KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Eight children were among 22 people hit by gunfire in a shooting at the end of Wednesday’s parade to celebrate the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl win, authorities said, sending terrified fans running for cover as yet another high-profile public event was marred by gun violence. One of those victims — a mother of two identified by her radio station as a DJ — was killed.

Kansas City Police Chief Stacey Graves said three people had been detained as part of the investigation. She said she has heard that fans may have been involved in tackling a suspect but couldn’t immediately confirm that.

“I’m angry at what happened today. The people who came to this celebration should expect a safe environment.” Graves said. Police did not immediately release any details about the people who were detained or about a possible motive for the shootings. She said firearms had been recovered, but not what kind.

“All of that is being actively investigated,” she said.

It is the latest sports celebration in the U.S. to end in gun violence, following a shooting that injured several people last year in downtown Denver after the Nuggets’ NBA championship, and gunfire last year at a parking lot near the Texas Rangers’ World Series championship parade.

Social media users posted shocking video of police running through a crowded scene as people hurriedly scrambled for cover and fled. One video showed someone apparently performing chest compressions on a shooting victim as another person, seemingly writhing in pain, lay on the ground nearby. People screamed in the background.

Another video showed two people chase and tackle a person, holding them down until two police officers arrived.

Radio station KKFI said in a Facebook post Wednesday evening that Lisa Lopez-Galvan, host of “Taste of Tejano,” was killed in the shooting.

“This senseless act has taken a beautiful person from her family and this KC Community,” KKFI said in a statement.

Lopez-Galvan, whose DJ name was “Lisa G,” was an extrovert and devoted mother from a prominent Latino family in the area, said Rosa Izurieta and Martha Ramirez, two childhood friends who worked with her at a staffing company. Izurieta said Lopez-Galvan had attended the parade with her husband and her adult son, a die-hard Kansas City sports fan who also was shot.

“She’s the type of person who would jump in front of a bullet for anybody — that would be Lisa,” Izurieta said.

The shooting outside Union Station happened despite more than 800 police officers who were in the building and around the area, including on top of nearby buildings, said Mayor Quinton Lucas, who attended with his wife and mother and had to run for cover when gunfire broke out.

“I think that’s something that all of us who are parents, who are just regular people living each day, have to decide what we wish to do about,” Lucas said. “Parades, rallies, schools, movies. It seems like almost nothing is safe.”

Kansas City has long struggled with gun violence, and in 2020 it was among nine cities targeted by the U.S. Justice Department in an effort to crack down on violent crime. In 2023 the city matched a record with 182 homicides, most of which involved guns.

Lucas has joined with mayors across the country in calling for new laws to reduce gun violence, including mandating universal background checks.

Lisa Money, a resident of the city, was trying to gather some confetti near the end of the parade when she heard somebody yell, “Down, down, everybody down!”

At first Money thought somebody might be joking until she saw the SWAT team jumping over the fence.

“I can’t believe it really happened. Who in their right mind would do something like this? This is supposed to be a day of celebration for everybody in the city and the surrounding area. And then you’ve got some idiot that wants to come along and do something like this,” she said.

Kevin Sanders, 53, of Lenexa, Kansas, said he heard what sounded like firecrackers and then people started running. After that initial flurry, calm returned, and he didn’t think much of it. But 10 minutes later, ambulances started showing up.

“It sucks that someone had to ruin the celebration, but we are in a big city,” Sanders said.

University Health spokeswoman Nancy Lewis said the hospital was treating eight gunshot victims. Two were in critical condition and six were in stable condition, she said. The hospital also was treating four people for other injuries resulting from the chaos after the shooting, Lewis said.

Lisa Augustine, spokesperson for Children’s Mercy Kansas City, said the hospital was treating 12 patients from the rally, including 11 children, some of whom suffered gunshot wounds.

St. Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City received one gunshot patient in critical condition and three walk-ins with injuries that were not life-threatening, spokesperson Laurel Gifford said.

“When you have this many casualties, it’s going to get spread out among a lot of hospitals so that you don’t overwhelm any single ER,” said Jill Jensen Chadwick, news director for University of Kansas Health System, which received at least one person injured in the shooting.

Chiefs trainer Rick Burkholder said that he was with coach Andy Reid and other coaches and staff members at the time of the shooting, and that the team was on buses and returning to Arrowhead Stadium.

“We are truly saddened by the senseless act of violence that occurred outside of Union Station at the conclusion of today’s parade and rally,” the team said in a statement.

Missouri’s Republican Gov. Mike Parson and first lady Teresa Parson were at the parade during the gunfire but were unhurt. “Thanks to the professionalism of our security officers and first responders, Teresa and I and our staff are safe and secure,” Parson said in a statement.

President Joe Biden said the shooting “cuts deep in the American soul” and called on people to press Congress to ban assault weapons, to limit high-capacity gun magazines and for other gun measures that have been rejected by Republicans.

“Today’s events should move us, shock us, shame us into acting. What are we waiting for?” he said.

Biden noted that Wednesday was the anniversary of the 2018 high schoool shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people and said there have been more mass shootings in 2024 “than there have been days in the year.”

Areas that had been filled with crowds were empty after the shooting, with police and firefighters standing and talking behind an area restricted by yellow tape.

Throngs had lined the route earlier, with fans climbing trees and street poles or standing on rooftops for a better view. Players rolled through the crowd on double-decker buses, as DJs and drummers heralded their arrival. Owner Clark Hunt was on one of the buses, holding the Lombardi Trophy.

The city and the team each chipped in around $1 million for the event commemorating Travis Kelce, Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs becoming the first team since Tom Brady and the New England Patriots two decades ago to defend their title.

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Associated Press writers Scott McFetridge in Des Moines, Iowa; Jim Salter in St. Louis; Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Summer Ballentine in Columbia, Missouri; and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.

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This story has been corrected to attribute a quote about hospitals receiving patients to Jill Jensen Chadwick, not Laurel Gifford.

The annual event is a tongue-in-cheek ritual in which Phil’s handlers, members of a club with roots in the late 19th century, reveal whether the groundhog has seen his shadow.

Just after sunrise Friday, the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club announced Phil did not see his shadow, which will usher in early springlike weather. The groundhog seeing his shadow presages six more weeks of winter, according to the group.

Before the announcement, President Tom Dunkel, in the traditional top hat and tuxedo worn by the club’s inner circle, explained that his cane, handed down from previous presidents, including his father, gave him the power to speak “Groundhog-ese” and that Phil would tell him which of two scrolls to use. At Dunkel’s direction, the crowd helped fire-up the groundhog with repeated chants of “Phil!” before a club member pulled the groundhog from a door in a stump on the stage and held it aloft.

Dunkel and other club members leaned over the stump where the groundhog sat before Dunkel pointed to one of two scrolls with the cane and announced that they had a decision.

Vice President Dan McGinley read the decision, written in verse and filled with quips about the groundhog’s envy for humans’ opposable thumbs and hopes to garner some Punxsutawney Phil write-in votes in 2024, from the chosen scroll and announced, “Glad tidings on this Groundhog Day, an early spring is on the way!”

About 10,000 people have made their way in recent years to Punxsutawney, where festivities begin in the dead of night and culminate in the midwinter forecast. A bundled-up crowd, some wearing groundhog-themed hats, watched musical performances and fireworks as they waited for sunrise and the appearance of Punxsutawney Phil.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro took the stage before Phil to urge people around the world watching the festivities to come to Punxsutawney next year. Shapiro also announced the famed groundhog is the new official meteorologist for Pennsylvania.

“Punxsutawney is the center of the universe right now and I love that you’re all here,” Shapiro said.

Phil predicts more winter far more often than he sees an early spring, not a bad bet for February and March in western Pennsylvania. A federal agency took a look at his record last year and put his accuracy rate at about 40%.

As the morning progressed, something like a groundhog consensus emerged, backing Punxsutawney Phil’s prognostication of an early spring. Among more than a dozen reports of weather predicting groundhogs in the U.S. and Canada early Friday, 10 were on Phil’s side and just three warned of six more weeks of winter.

Octoraro Orphie in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, a rival of the Punxsutawney groundhog for more than a century, says the cold will be around for awhile. But groundhogs in Staten Island, New York; Nova Scotia and Quebec in Canada; Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois and Ohio were all on Phil’s side — an early spring.

The tradition of celebrating the midpoint between the shortest day of the year on the winter solstice and the spring equinox goes back many centuries in European farm life.

There are more than a dozen active groundhog clubs in Pennsylvania, some dating back to the 1930s, and weather-predicting groundhogs have appeared in at least 28 U.S. states and Canadian provinces.

The 1993 blockbuster film “Groundhog Day,” starring Bill Murray, fueled interest in Punxsutawney Phil and inspired informal observations far and wide.

When he’s not making his annual prognostication, Phil lives in a customized space beside the Punxsutawney Memorial Library, with a window where library patrons can check out his burrow. Back in 2009, library workers said Phil had somehow managed to escape three times, climbing into the library ceiling and dropping into offices about 50 feet (15 meters) away. He wasn’t injured.

LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — The restaurant where Katie Austin was a server burned in the wildfire that devastated Hawaii’s historic town of Lahaina this summer.

Two months later, as travelers began to trickle back to nearby beach resorts, she went to work at a different eatery. But she soon quit, worn down by constant questions from diners: Was she affected by the fire? Did she know anyone who died?

“You’re at work for eight hours and every 15 minutes you have a new stranger ask you about the most traumatic day of your life,” Austin said. “It was soul-sucking.”

Hawaii’s governor and mayor invited tourists back to the west side of Maui months after the Aug. 8 fire killed at least 100 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings. They wanted the economic boost tourists would bring, particularly heading into the year-end holidays.

But some residents are struggling with the return of an industry requiring workers to be attentive and hospitable even though they are trying to care for themselves after losing their loved ones, friends, homes and community.

Maui is a large island. Many parts, like the ritzy resorts in Wailea, 30 miles (48 kilometers) south of Lahaina — where the first season of the HBO hit “The White Lotus” was filmed — are eagerly welcoming travelers and their dollars.

Things are more complicated in west Maui. Lahaina is still a mess of charred rubble. Efforts to clean up toxic debris are painstakingly slow. It’s off-limits to everyone except residents.

Tensions are peaking over the lack of long-term, affordable housing for wildfire evacuees, many of whom work in tourism. Dozens have been camping out in protest around the clock on a popular tourist beach at Kaanapali, a few miles north of Lahaina. Last week, hundreds marched between two large hotels waving signs reading, “We need housing now!” and “Short-term rentals gotta go!”

Hotels at Kaanapali are still housing about 6,000 fire evacuees unable to find long-term shelter in Maui’s tight and expensive housing market. But some have started to bring back tourists, and owners of timeshare condos have returned. At a shopping mall, visitors stroll past shops and dine at at open-air oceanfront restaurants.

Austin took a job at a restaurant in Kaanapali after the fire, but quit after five weeks. It was a strain to serve mai tais to people staying in a hotel or vacation rental while her friends were leaving the island because they lacked housing, she said.

Servers and many others in the tourism industry often work for tips, which puts them in a difficult position when a customer prods them with questions they don’t want to answer. Even after Austin’s restaurant posted a sign asking customers to respect employees’ privacy, the queries continued.

“I started telling people, ‘Unless you’re a therapist, I don’t want to talk to you about it,’” she said.

Austin now plans to work for a nonprofit organization that advocates for housing.

Erin Kelley didn’t lose her home or workplace but has been laid off as a bartender at Sheraton Maui Resort since the fire. The hotel reopened to visitors in late December, but she doesn’t expect to get called back to work until business picks up.

She has mixed feelings. Workers should have a place to live before tourists are welcome in west Maui, she said, but residents are so dependent on the industry that many will remain jobless without those same visitors.

“I’m really sad for friends and empathetic towards their situation,” she said. “But we also need to make money,”

When she does return to work, Kelley said she won’t want to “talk about anything that happened for the past few months.”

More travel destinations will likely have to navigate these dilemmas as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural disasters.

There is no manual for doing so, said Chekitan Dev, a tourism professor at Cornell University. Handling disasters — natural and manmade — will have to be part of their business planning.

Andreas Neef, a development professor and tourism researcher at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, suggested one solution might be to promote organized “voluntourism.” Instead of sunbathing, tourists could visit part of west Maui that didn’t burn and enlist in an effort to help the community.

“Bringing tourists for relaxation back is just at this time a little bit unrealistic,” Neef said. “I couldn’t imagine relaxing in a place where you still feel the trauma that has affected the place overall.”

Many travelers have been canceling holiday trips to Maui out of respect, said Lisa Paulson, the executive director of the Maui Hotel and Lodging Association. Visitation is down about 20% from December of 2022, according to state data.

Cancellations are affecting hotels all over the island, not just in west Maui.

Paulson attributes some of this to confusing messages in national and social media about whether visitors should come. Many people don’t understand the island’s geography or that there are places people can visit outside west Maui, she said.

One way visitors can help is to remember they’re traveling to a place that recently experienced significant trauma, said Amory Mowrey, the executive director of Maui Recovery, a mental health and substance abuse residential treatment center.

“Am I being driven by compassion and empathy or am I just here to take, take, take?” he said.

That’s the approach honeymooners Jordan and Carter Prechel of Phoenix adopted. They kept their reservations in Kihei, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Lahaina, vowing to be respectful and to support local businesses.

“Don’t bombard them with questions,” Jordan said recently while eating an afternoon snack in Kaanapali with her husband. “Be conscious of what they’ve gone through.”

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This story has been corrected to fix the spelling of the first name of Cornell University Professor Chekitan Dev.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Speaker Kevin McCarthy was voted out of the job Tuesday in an extraordinary showdown, a first in U.S. history that was forced by a contingent of hard-right conservatives and threw the House and its Republican leadership into chaos.

McCarthy’s chief rival, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, forced the vote on the “motion to vacate,” drawing together more than a handful of conservative Republican critics of the speaker and many Democrats who said he was unworthy of leadership.

The next steps are uncertain, but there is no obvious successor to lead the House Republican majority.

Stillness fell as the presiding officer gaveled the vote closed, 216-210, saying the office of the speaker “is hereby declared vacant.”

Moments later, a top McCarthy ally, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., took the gavel and, according to House rules, was named speaker pro tempore to serve in the office until a new speaker was chosen.

The House then briskly recessed so lawmakers could meet and discuss the path forward.

It was a stunning moment for the battle-tested McCarthy, a punishment fueled by growing grievances but sparked by his weekend decision to work with Democrats to keep the federal government open rather than risk a shutdown.

An earlier vote was 218-208 against tabling the motion, with 11 Republicans allowing it to advance.

Congressman Doug LaMalfa, whose district represents Butte and Tehama counties, voted against the resolution to remove McCarthy, whom he called a good friend who did not deserve to be betrayed.

“Today was one of the most frustrating and self-destructive days I have seen in Congress. By joining with Democrats, a small splinter group has removed the most conservative Speaker of the House we have likely ever had, he said. “I do not see a path forward today that results in lower spending, more freedom for individuals, or a more secure border. The likely outcome when the dust settles will be with Democrats holding more power and Republican priorities sidelined.”

The House then opened a floor debate, unseen in modern times, ahead of the next round of voting.

McCarthy, of California, insisted he would not cut a deal with Democrats to remain in power — not that he could have relied on their help even if he had asked.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a letter to colleagues that he wanted to work with Republicans, but he was unwilling to provide the votes needed to save McCarthy.

“It is now the responsibility of the GOP members to end the House Republican Civil War,” Jeffries said, announcing the Democratic leadership would vote for the motion to oust the speaker.

As the House fell silent, Gaetz, a top ally of Donald Trump, rose to offer his motion. Gaetz is a leader of the hard-right Republicans who fought in January against McCarthy in his prolonged battle to gain the gavel.

“It’s a sad day,” Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said as the debate got underway, urging his colleagues not to plunge the House Republican majority “into chaos.”

But Gaetz shot back during the debate, “Chaos is Speaker McCarthy.”

McCarthy’s fate was deeply uncertain as the fiery debate unfolded, with much of the complaints against the speaker revolving around his truthfulness and his ability to keep the promises he had made since January to win the gavel.

But a long line of McCarthy supporters, including Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a founding leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus, stood up for him: “I think he has kept his word.” And some did so passionately. Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., waved his cellphone, saying it was “disgusting” that hard-right colleagues were fundraising off the move in text messages seeking donations.

At the Capitol, both Republicans and Democrats met privately ahead of the historic afternoon vote.

Behind closed doors, McCarthy told fellow Republicans: Let’s get on with it.

“If I counted how many times someone wanted to knock me out, I would have been gone a long time ago,” McCarthy said at the Capitol after the morning meeting.

McCarthy insisted he had not reached across the aisle to the Democratic leader Jeffries for help with votes to stay in the job, nor had they demanded anything in return.

During the hour-long meeting in the Capitol basement, McCarthy invoked Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon, who more than 100 years ago confronted his critics head-on by calling their bluff and setting the vote himself on his ouster. Cannon survived that takedown attempt, which was the first time the House had actually voted to consider removing its speaker. A more recent threat, in 2015, didn’t make it to a vote.

McCarthy received three standing ovations during the private meeting — one when he came to the microphone to speak, again during his remarks, and finally when he was done, according to a Republican at the meeting who was granted anonymity to discuss it.

At one point, there was a show of hands in support of McCarthy and it was “overwhelming,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., a member of the House Freedom Caucus.

Gaetz was in attendance, but he did not address the room.

Across the way in the Capitol, Democrats lined up for a long discussion and unified around one common point: McCarthy cannot be trusted, several lawmakers in the room said.

“I think it’s safe to say there’s not a lot of goodwill in that room for Kevin McCarthy,” said Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass.

“At the end of the day, the country needs a speaker that can be relied upon,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. “We don’t trust him. Their members don’t trust him. And you need a certain degree of trust to be the speaker.”

Removing the speaker launches the House Republicans into chaos, as they try to find a new leader. It took McCarthy himself 15 rounds in January over multiple days of voting before he secured the support from his colleagues to gain the gavel. There is no obvious GOP successor.

Trump, the former president who is the Republican front-runner in the 2024 race to challenge Biden, weighed in to complain about the chaos. “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves,” he asked on social media.

One key McCarthy ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., took to social media urging support for “our speaker” and an end to the chaos that has roiled the Republican majority.

Republicans were upset that McCarthy relied on Democratic votes Saturday to approve the temporary measure to keep the government running until Nov. 17. Some would have preferred a government shutdown as they fight for deeper spending cuts.

But Democrats were also upset with McCarthy for walking away from the debt deal that he made with Biden earlier this year that already set federal spending levels, as he emboldened his right flank to push for steep spending reductions.

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Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Stephen Groves and Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Fire captains Dustin Mattos and Jordan Weber were the two picked to go.

“Teams are going from all over the state,” said Cal Fire-Butte County Public Information Officer Rick Carhart. “Mattos and Weber are part of an incident management team. They are going with a team to support the efforts in Hawaii.”

The two men are part of a team called Incident Management Team One ordered by the state of Hawaii Emergency Management. They were requested.

“Whenever the team gets activated, they go as part of the team,” Carhart said. “Another incident management team was activated to report to Riverside County to support the families and the funerals of people killed in the helicopter crash there.”

Carhart said he didn’t know the exact roles Weber and Mattos are taking on, but there are a lot of administrative overhead positions, such as working at base camp or working in the office helping with planning or with operations.

The team consists of 67 members. They come from all over the state of California and could be part of Siskiyou County all the way to San Diego, Carhart said.

Carhart said he didn’t know for how long Mattos and Weber will be in Hawaii.

“They are just told to go and will stay until the job is done,” he said.

Mattos is a resource unit leader. Weber is a captain in the planning department. He and the others will come up with the operational component.

“Those are the guys who come up with the plan every day for what they will do,” said Carhart.

The resource unit leader works on logistics and figures out what resources are going where along with who is bringing food and supplies and what goes along with people out fighting the fire.

“Everyone is on the line doing the job and making sure everyone has the equipment and support they need,” Carhart said.

She has videos of her own terrifying escape from fire, the ones her trauma counselor has urged her to avoid. Nearly five years ago, from the driver’s seat of her bright yellow VW, stuck in paralyzed traffic, her phone camera captured the smoke turning day to night as she fled the deadliest wildfire in California history, the Camp Fire in her hometown of Paradise. It recorded her chilling screams — “Move! Move!” — that no one could hear, and the man named Larry in a big white truck who rescued her and her three elderly dogs panting in the back seat.

This week, when she watched the video of two men fleeing Lahaina in their car, the smoky skies, the sheets of glowing orange embers, the driver gasping and honking, she knew it had to be her last.

“I was panicking for him. I wanted to put my foot on the gas for him,” Fisher said in an interview Friday with the Bay Area News Group. “Your whole car is going up. You can’t touch windows. And they didn’t know what was happening. Just like I didn’t know what was happening.”

But no one knows better what the survivors of Hawaii’s deadliest natural disaster are going through — and what lies ahead — than the thousands of Californians who have endured the same.

“This whole town of Paradise knows exactly what they’re feeling,” Fisher said. “It was fast. It was brutal. They just had to go with their gut. And some didn’t make it.”

Deja vu

Three of California’s top five deadliest wildfires occurred since 2017. Seven of the state’s top 10 most destructive wildfires have occurred since 2015. None was deadlier than the Camp Fire.

In the ridge-top town of Paradise, 85 people died in 2018 when the inferno ripped through without warning on the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, just as bus drivers were dropping off children at school. Of the 18,000 homes, only 2,000 survived. A town once home to 27,000 people now has no more than 9,000 — the stalwarts who returned and rebuilt, even though the commercial corridor remains nearly empty and officials from the local hospital that was destroyed announced they won’t build a new one.

The official death toll in Maui, where winds from a distant hurricane fanned the flames, climbed to 80 late Friday night and was expected to grow. Many died fleeing in their vehicles. Dozens plunged into the ocean for safety. Nearly the entire ocean-front town of Lahaina, a historic district and tourist mecca known for its ancient banyan tree with arms spanning an entire block, has been leveled.

And the smoke still hasn’t cleared.

In the hearts and souls of many Paradise survivors, it may never. Residents often talk about sleepless nights and nightmares, intense anxiety and anger, guilt, depression and claustrophobia.

Carole Wright had to leave church early one Sunday when everyone around her rose to sing a hymn, but she felt boxed in and panicked.

“I nearly was leapfrogging over these benches,” she said. She, too, had been stuck on the main road out of Paradise, with the fire around her so hot, the heat seared her skin and deflated her tires. She considered getting out and running but decided to stay in her car. If she was going to die, she told herself, she hoped she would pass out first. She drove out five hours later on metal rims. When she saw daylight piercing through the smoke, she remembers, she started to cry.

“My fear isn’t fire,” she said. “It’s getting trapped.”

Her husband, Travis, who was at home that morning, narrowly escaped on a four-wheel ATV. But he carries guilt about the death of one of his neighbors, who rode alongside him with his wife on their own quad but was overcome by fire.

His own house, made with cement shingles and protected by other neighbors who saved it to save themselves, survived.

“I could have just told everyone to stay at our house,” he said.

It needed significant reconstruction — the shingles remained but the walls inside burned — and their once wooded property with 160 Ponderosa Pine trees is now so sunbaked they had to purchase blinds for every window.

“People try to make us feel better and say, ‘Oh well, at least you have a view now,’” Carole said. “But I liked my view before.”

Recovery

In their rebuilt house across town, Richard and Zetta Gore now have a view from their front porch of Butte Canyon, where they abandoned their truck and the two Bibles inside on that apocalyptic morning and slid down the side of the bluff to escape the flames. Turkeys and deer ran alongside them as they fled. They have returned several times with family to show them the route of their 7-mile hike to safety and wonder, “Did we really do that?”

They replaced their two-story handcrafted home with a simple, one-story one on the same spot. It’s as much as their insurance claim would allow.

Still, they are grateful. “Every time we leave the house we pray, ‘Lord, take care of our house’ because we’ve learned — you leave, and you don’t know if you’ll ever see it again,” Zetta said. “It’s true. It has affected us in that way.”

And it makes them especially empathetic to those suffering in Maui.

“There’s so many points that were identical to what happened here in Paradise,” Richard Gore said. “But we do know that they will rise again because Paradise has. They’ll get through it.”

Civic groups from Paradise, including the Rotary Club, have already reached out to Maui with offers to help. Town Councilman Steve “Woody” Culleton wrote an email to Maui’s mayor and sent it Thursday morning.

Culleton choked up when he read it aloud.

“As a resident of Paradise CA and a survivor of the 2018 Camp Fire storm I and our community know what you folks are going through,” he wrote.

His family ran for their lives that November morning — he and his wife were stuck in separate cars miles apart — and lost everything they owned.

But there’s a reason to have hope, he wrote.

“The truth I can share is that even though it is devastating when everything you own and your home and routine and community are destroyed,” he wrote, “it is possible to come back and rebuild.”

Two weeks ago, Fisher began doing just that. She and her boyfriend moved back to Paradise. They bought a lot with a converted garage that had been spared by the 2018 fire and hope to one day build a house where the old one stood.

Maui holds a special place for her. The last time she saw her father, two years before he died, they had rented a condo in Lahaina in 2011. The day she left, father and daughter enjoyed a picnic under the sprawling banyan tree.

She is taking her therapist’s advice to avoid fire videos, but still she scrolls through Facebook, where she read a plaintive post from an old Paradise High School friend who moved to Maui years ago.

“Please pray for me,” it said.

“It’s hard not to think about other people’s pain and suffering, but I’m trying to pull myself away,” she said. “And then I will wait and I will ask my friend what can I do to help her because I do want to help a fire survivor. That’s what we do.”

“Sending love and support from Paradise, California,” Crick commented on one woman’s social media post.

To Crick’s surprise, the woman wrote back. She knew Paradise — the small Northern California city in the Sierra Nevada foothills that was mostly destroyed by a wildfire in 2018. The woman told Crick her support meant a lot to her.

“That was a really heavy moment,” Crick told The Associated Press.

Lahaina, Hawaii, is a tropical paradise on the northwest coast of Maui. But wildfires ravaging the region have forever linked it to another Paradise, this one in California. The two small towns have the grim distinction of experiencing the deadliest U.S. wildfires in more than a century — tragedies that played out in a remarkably similar way.

“It’s not what we want to be remembered for,” Crick said.

Both blazes started in the overnight hours when it’s difficult to warn people, and moved quickly, leaving people with very little time to flee. Both places were isolated, with few roads leading in or out. The California fire killed at least 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures. The Hawaii fire has so far killed more than 50 people and destroyed more than 1,000 buildings.

Most people would think a place like Paradise — located in the forests of wildfire-prone California — wouldn’t share a lot of similarities with a small town in Hawaii, a state known for its lush landscapes.

But the two places have more in common than you would think, especially when it comes to wildfires, said Hugh Safford, a fire and vegetation ecologist at the University of California-Davis. The wildfire risks for both places have been well known for years, especially as a changing climate has ushered in hotter, drier seasons that have made wildfires more intense, he noted.

“I’m not at all surprised that Hawaii has had a fire like this,” Safford said. “It was just a matter of time.”

As images filled news reports from Hawaii this week, Paradise was one of the only other places in the U.S. where people truly knew what it was like. It wasn’t a good feeling, residents say.

“It immediately triggers, for all of us … the emotions. It’s remembering the fear,” said Steve “Woody” Culleton, a member of the Paradise Town Council who lost his home in the 2018 fire. “It’s a tremendous sense of sadness, and you try to push it down.”

At the Paradise Rotary Club meeting on Wednesday, members acknowledged the Hawaii wildfire with a moment of silence. But they quickly moved on to how they could help.

Pam Gray, a Rotary Club member who lost her home in the 2018 fire, said the local club received more than $2.1 million in donations in the weeks after the blaze. The club used the money to hand out gift cards to people and pay for things such as tree removal. Now, Gray said, the club will be looking to return the favor to Hawaii.

“This whole community of people experienced what we did. If we continue to wallow in it every day, all day, then we can’t get better and our community can’t get better and we cannot help anyone else,” she said. “We went through that experience for a reason. And I believe it was to help other people.”

But others, including Laura Smith, have not felt an urge yet to jump in and help. Smith lost her home and most everything she owned in the 2018 fire. She said it was so overwhelming, it felt like she was “living in a lion’s mouth.”

“My sense is that the folks there just need space to process what just happened to them and to not be overflowing with platitudes with how everything is going to be fine, because it certainly will not be fine for a long time,” Smith said. “I mean, I am sure that they’ll recover. We did. I have. My kids have. But it’s still a wound that we struggle with sometimes.”

In Paradise on Wednesday, hundreds of people showed up for a ceremony to celebrate the opening of a new, state-of-the art building at the local high school. The school was one of the few places that did not burn in the 2018 fire, becoming an anchor of sorts for the community’s rebuilding efforts.

The school library displayed various yearbooks from past classes, allowing alumni a chance to remember happier times. Conversations soon drifted to the Hawaii fire, and then inevitably back to the Paradise fire, said Crick, who attended the event as president of the Paradise Unified School District school board.

Crick couldn’t help but wonder: Would the survivors of the Hawaii wildfires gather in five years to peruse their own past?

“What does it look like for their community?” she asked. “How do we support somebody even more secluded than we were when our fire happened?”

Mayor Greg Bolin said everyone he spoke to at the Paradise recovery event said their minds were on the victims in Hawaii.

“You know what their life is going to be like. … You know how hard and how difficult times are going to be,” he said. “But if they stay with it, there is hope on the other side. It does come together. And our town is coming back.”

LAHAINA, Hawaii (AP) — Incinerated cars crushed by downed telephone poles. Charred elevator shafts standing as testaments to the burned down apartment buildings they once served. Pools filled with charcoal colored water. Trampolines and children’s scooters mangled by the extreme heat.

Residents of the Lahaina were being allowed back home on Friday for the first time since wildfires that have killed at least 55 people turned large swaths of the centuries-old town into a hellscape of ashen rubble.

Associated Press journalists witnessed the devastation, with nearly every building flattened to debris on Front Street, the heart of the Maui community and the economic hub of the island. The roosters known to roam Hawaii streets meandered through the ashes of what was left, including an eerie traffic jam of the charred remains of dozens of cars that didn’t make it out of the inferno.

“It hit so quick, it was incredible,” Lahaina resident Kyle Scharnhorst said as he surveyed his apartment complex’s damage Friday morning. “It was like a war zone.”

The wildfires are the state’s deadliest natural disaster since a 1960 tsunami that killed 61 people. An even deadlier tsunami in 1946, which killed more than 150 people on the Big Island, prompted the development of the territory-wide emergency system that includes sirens, which are sounded monthly to test their readiness.

But many survivors said in interviews that they didn’t hear any sirens or receive a warning that gave them enough time to prepare and only realized they were in danger when they saw flames or heard explosions nearby.

“There was no warning. There was absolutely none. Nobody came around. We didn’t see a fire truck or anybody,” said Lynn Robinson, who lost her home in the fire.

Hawaii emergency management records show no indication that warning sirens sounded before people had to run for their lives. Instead, officials sent alerts to mobile phones, televisions and radio stations — but widespread power and cellular outages may have limited their reach.

Gov. Josh Green warned that the death toll would likely rise as search and rescue operations continue. He also said Lahaina residents would be allowed to return Friday to check on their property and that people will be able to get out, too, to get water and access other services. People would be allowed into West Maui starting at noon, and authorities set a curfew from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m. Saturday.

“The recovery’s going to be extraordinarily complicated, but we do want people to get back to their homes and just do what they can to assess safely because it’s pretty dangerous,” Green told Hawaii News Now.

Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, at least three wildfires erupted on Maui this week, racing through parched brush covering the island.

The most serious one swept into Lahaina on Tuesday and left it a grid of gray rubble wedged between the blue ocean and lush green slopes. Skeletal remains of buildings bowed under roofs that pancaked in the blaze. Palm trees were torched, boats in the harbor were scorched and the stench of burning lingered.

Summer and Gilles Gerling sought to salvage their family’s keepsakes from the ashes of their home. But all they could find was the piggy bank Summer’s father gave her as a child, their daughter’s jade bracelet and the watches they gifted each other for their wedding.

Their wedding rings were gone.

They described their fear as the strong wind whipped and the smoke and flames moved closer. But they said they were just happy that they and their two children made it out alive.

“It is what it is,” Gilles said. “Safety was the main concern. These are all material things.”

The blaze is the deadliest U.S. wildfire since the 2018 Camp Fire in California, which killed at least 85 people and laid waste to the town of Paradise. Cadaver-sniffing dogs were brought in Friday to assist the search for the remains of people killed by the inferno, said Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen Jr.

Lahaina’s wildfire risk was well known. Maui County’s hazard mitigation plan, last updated in 2020, identified Lahaina and other West Maui communities as having frequent wildfires and a large number of buildings at risk of wildfire damage.

The report also noted that West Maui had the island’s second-highest rate of households without a vehicle and the highest rate of non-English speakers.

“This may limit the population’s ability to receive, understand and take expedient action during hazard events,” the plan noted.

Maui’s firefighting efforts may also have been hampered by a small staff, said Bobby Lee, the president of the Hawaii Firefighters Association. There are a maximum of 65 firefighters working at any given time in Maui County, and they are responsible for fighting fires on three islands — Maui, Molokai and Lanai — he said.

Those crews have about 13 fire engines and two ladder trucks, but the department does not have any off-road vehicles, he said. That means fire crews can’t attack brush fires thoroughly before they reach roads or populated areas.

Lana Vierra is eager to return to Lahaina even though she knows the home she raised five children in is no longer there.

“To actually stand there on your burnt grounds and get your wheels turning on how to move forward — I think it will give families that peace,” she said.

When she fled Tuesday, she thought it would be temporary. She spent Friday morning filling out FEMA assistance forms at a relative’s house in Haiku.

She’s eager to see Lahaina but isn’t sure how she’ll feel once she’s there. She’s thinking about the sheds in the back that housed family mementos — “my kids’ yearbooks and all that kind of stuff. Their baby pictures,” she said. “That’s what hurts a mother the most.”

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Kelleher reported from Honolulu. These Associated Press writers contributed to the report: Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho; Andrew Selsky in Bend, Oregon; Bobby Caina Calvan and Beatrice Dupuy in New York; Chris Megerian in Salt Lake City; Audrey McAvoy in Wailuku, Hawaii; and Adam Beam in Sacramento, California.

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump pleaded not guilty Thursday to trying to overturn the results of his 2020 presidential election loss, answering for the first time to federal charges that accuse him of orchestrating a brazen and ultimately failed attempt to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

Trump appeared before a magistrate judge in Washington’s federal courthouse two days after being indicted on four felony counts by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith. The charges accuse him of trying to subvert the will of voters and undo his election loss in the days before Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a violent and bloody clash with law enforcement.

Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner, is facing charges including conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct Congress’ certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory. His appearance Thursday, and the rest of the court case, will unfold in a courthouse blocks in clear view of the Capitol and in a building where more than 1,000 of the Capitol rioters have been charged.

Trump has said he is innocent, and his legal team has characterized the latest case as an attack on his right to free speech. The case is part of an ongoing set of escalating legal troubles for the ex-president, coming nearly two months after Trump pleaded not guilty to dozens of federal felony counts accusing him of hoarding classified documents and thwarting government efforts to retrieve them.

Smith himself was in the courtroom and sat in the front row behind the prosecutors handling the case. Three police officers who defended the Capitol that day were also seen entering the courthouse.

The indictment from Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith charges Trump with four felony counts related to his efforts to undo his presidential election loss, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The charges could lead to a yearslong prison sentence in the event of a conviction.

The former president was the only person charged in the case, though prosecutors referenced six unnamed co-conspirators, mostly lawyers, they say he plotted with, including in a scheme to enlist fake electors in seven battleground states won by Biden to submit false certificates to the federal government.

The indictment chronicles how Trump and his Republican allies, in what Smith described as an attack on a “bedrock function of the U.S. government,” repeatedly lied about the results in the two months after he lost the election and pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, and state election officials to take action to help him cling to power.

This is the third criminal case brought against Trump in less than six months.

He was charged in New York with falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment to a porn actor during the 2016 presidential campaign. Smith’s office also has charged him with 40 felony counts in Florida, accusing him of illegally retaining classified documents at his Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, and refusing government demands to give them back. He has pleaded not guilty in both those cases, which are set for trial next year.

And prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia, are expected in coming weeks to announce charging decisions in an investigation into efforts to subvert election results in that state.

Trump’s lawyer John Lauro has asserted in television interviews that Trump’s actions were protected by the First Amendment right to free speech and that he relied on the advice of lawyers. Trump has claimed without evidence that Smith’s team is trying to interfere with the 2024 presidential election.

AP writers Lindsay Whitehurst, Ellen Knickmeyer, Ashraf Khalil, Rebecca Santana, Stephen Groves, Serkan Gurbuz, Rick Gentilo, Alex Brandon, Yihan Deng, Kara Brown, Nathan Posner and Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of Donald Trump at https://apnews.com/hub/donald-trump and of the U.S. Capitol insurrection at https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege.

WILMINGTON, Del. — The plea deal in Hunter Biden’s criminal case unraveled during a court hearing Wednesday after a federal judge raised concerns about the terms of the agreement that has infuriated Republicans who believe the president’s son is getting preferential treatment.

Hunter Biden was charged last month with two misdemeanor crimes of failure to pay more than $100,000 in taxes from over $1.5 million in income in both 2017 and 2018 and had been expected to plead guilty Wednesday after he made an agreement with prosecutors, who were planning to recommend two years of probation. Prosecutors said Wednesday that Hunter Biden remains under active investigation, but would not reveal details.

U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, raised multiple concerns about the specifics of the deal and her role in the proceedings.

The plan also included an agreement on a separate gun charge — Biden has been accused of possessing a firearm in 2018 as a drug user. As long as he adhered to the terms of his agreement, the gun case was to be wiped from his record. Otherwise, the felony charge carries 10 years in prison.

The overlapping agreements created confusion for the judge, who said the lawyers needed to untangle technical issues — including over her role in enforcing the gun agreement — before moving forward.

“It seems to me like you are saying ‘just rubber stamp the agreement, Your Honor.’ … This seems to me to be form over substance,” she said. She asked defense lawyers and prosecutors to explain why she should accept the deal. In the meantime, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to the tax charges.

The collapsed proceedings were a surprising development in the yearslong investigation, and a resolution that had been carefully negotiated over several weeks and included a lengthy back-and-forth between Justice Department prosecutors and Biden’s attorneys.

The plea deal was meant to clear the air for Hunter Biden and avert a trial that would have generated weeks or months of distracting headlines. But the politics remain as messy as ever, with Republicans insisting he got a sweetheart deal and the Justice Department pressing ahead on investigations into Trump, the GOP’s 2024 presidential primary front-runner.

Trump is already facing a state criminal case in New York and a federal indictment in Florida. Last week, a target letter was sent to Trump from special counsel Jack Smith that suggests the former president may soon be indicted on new federal charges, this time involving his struggle to cling to power after his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

Republicans claim a double standard, in which the Democratic president’s son got off easy while the president’s rival has been unfairly castigated. Congressional Republicans are pursuing their own investigations into nearly every facet of Hunter Biden’s dealings, including foreign payments.

“District Judge Noreika did the right thing by refusing to rubberstamp Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal,” said House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Ky. “But let’s be clear: Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal belongs in the trash.”

Wednesday’s hearing quickly veered into confusion, with Hunter Biden at one point answering “yes” when asked if he was pleading guilty of his own free will, before later pulling back in moving forward with the plea.

The judge said she was concerned about a provision in the agreement on the gun charge that she said would have created a role for her where she would determine if he violated the terms. She argued such a role doesn’t exist for judges; the lawyers said they were only asking for the court to play a factfinding role as a neutral party in determining if a violation happened.

“We wanted the protection of the court,” Biden’s attorney Chris Clark said.

She also raised concerns that the agreement included a non-prosecution clause for crimes outside of the gun charge.

The attorneys appeared to squabble over the deal’s terms, too, retreating to their corners to discuss the issues, before they met at the prosecutors’ table and, at one point, could be heard yelling at each other. “Well, we’ll just rip it up!” Clark was heard shouting.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The judge also asked Biden to be more specific about his business relationships and to discuss his substance use issues as she combed through the plea agreement. She asked him to name the Ukrainian and Chinese entities referred to without name in the agreement.

She also asked him the last time he used alcohol or drugs and whether he was currently receiving treatment.

Biden answered June 1, 2019, and said he was not currently in treatment, though he did say he was in an anonymous support program for his substance abuse issues.

“Hunter Biden is a private citizen, and this was a personal matter for him,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. “As we have said, the president, the first lady, they love their son, and they support him as he continues to rebuild his life. This case was handled independently, as all of you know, by the Justice Department under the leadership of a prosecutor appointed by the former president, President Trump.”

President Biden, meanwhile, has said very little publicly, except to note, “I’m very proud of my son.”

Associated Press writers Lindsay Whitehurst and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.