US President Joe Biden on Monday met the survivors of the Maui wildfires. He told the survivors that he could relate to their plight because he and First Lady Jill Biden knew what it was like to lose a home to a fire.
The 80-year-old president was trying to console the survivors by invoking a small kitchen fire in 2004 at his residence in Delaware.
"I don't want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, of what it was like to lose a home," Mr Biden said. "Years ago, now, 15 years, I was in Washington doing 'Meet the press'... Lightning struck at home on a little lake outside the home, not a lake a big pond. It hit the wire and came up underneath our home, into the...air condition ducts."
He added, "To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my 67 Corvette, and my cat."
Mr Biden added that firefighters who responded "ran into flames to save my wife and save my family. Not a joke."
The Maui wildfires, deadliest in over a century, caused widespread destruction on Aug. 8 killing at least 114 people.
The US President made a 13-minute speech to a group of survivors in Lahaina- the city destroyed by flames.
People on the internet accused the president of being insensitive to the tragedy of Maui.
Mr Biden is fighting criticism his government was too slow to respond to the disaster that devastated a town of more than 12,000 people, with locals angry at what some see as a plodding official response.
Residents have also lashed out at Maui officials who they say should have sounded an alarm system as the fire erupted.
As a result, "a warm welcome may not be assured for Biden in some circles on Maui," the Honolulu Star-Advertiser newspaper said ahead of the visit.
Biden and First Lady Jill Biden walked through the ravaged remains of Lahaina with Hawaii's Governor Josh Green and his wife, nearly two weeks after ferocious, wind-whipped blazes sent residents jumping into the ocean to escape the flames.
The couple also took to the air in Marine One, the presidential helicopter, to see the crushing extent of the devastation that left the former royal capital in ashes.
Many houses were completely destroyed by the wall of fire that tore through the town; the shells of other buildings still stand, shorn of the vibrancy that made Lahaina a major tourist draw.
The burned-out hulks of cars litter roads where they were abandoned by drivers who realised -- some too late -- that the way out was snarled with traffic.
