SZA donated $2.5K to a local family affected by the wildfire in Maui.
SZA was among celebrities who offered aids to the victims of deadly wildfires in Maui. The “Kill Bill” hitmaker was revealed to make a donation of $2,500 to a local family affected by the disaster, though her charitable act was met with mockery on social media.
Catching wind of the donation that SZA, whose real name is Solana Rowe, made, some X users appeared to think that the amount was too little for a star. “She could’ve done more @SZA,” one troll wrote on the micro-blogging platform, which was previously known as Twitter. “She couldn’t squeeze in more numbers?” another asked.
Experts warn that extreme weather conditions and disasters like this wildfire will occur more frequently and with greater intensity due to climate change, though that is not the only contributing factor at hand. “When the air is hotter it can hold more water vapor, so that means you get more water evaporating from plants, and that dries them out,” says Jeff Masters, a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections. “But you can’t blame it just on climate change, that’s for sure. Humans are causing this wildfire risk in multiple ways.”
The catastrophe began on Aug. 8. High winds, that some officials say may have been as strong as 60-81 mph, engulfed the area in flames at a rate that was difficult to escape. A lagging emergency warning system caused chaos on the island, with anecdotes of survivors running to the ocean to escape the flames. More than a thousand people remain unaccounted for.
A week later, officials still do not know what the exact cause of the fires were, but experts say that the wildfire’s devastation is due to a mix of high temperatures, strong winds from a Category 4 storm near the islands, and drought conditions that dried out grasses on the island.
