For Crying Out Loud, The Sirens Aren’t The Only Problem
To listen to the news, one might think that the biggest problem with the Maui wildfire disaster in Lahaina is that the emergency warning sirens didn’t go off or weren’t activated. To listen to reporting, one might have the impression that if only the sirens had gone off, everyone could have gotten away safely — and that’s not even a little bit true.
If only it was so simple.
The harder truth is that sirens or not, this was always going to be tragic. It’s a disaster. It’s easy to point fingers at one tiny highly visible — or audible — missing piece because people are angry and the media want an easy headline. Yet it would be helpful for everyone if the media could apply some critical thinking to their reporting.
We might come at problem-solving differently if we talked more frequently about the many complicated aspects of things like disasters which are by their very nature angering and traumatizing. Stepping back and getting more perspective can help everyone take a beat and try to figure out how to move forward together. The reality in any crisis is that we never do enough before a disaster to make it perfect when it hits, and the people who make some of the mistakes or who don’t do enough before are often also the people who made the disaster less bad as it unfolded and who are dealing with a lot of the trauma up-close.
Here’s some of the more complicated reality we can quickly piece together about what happened in Lahaina to create the perfect firestorm.
A quick rundown of what we know & don’t know about the Lahaina wildfire:
Hawaii is a state with known wildfire risk, fire ecology, and existing wildfire response systems.
Hawaii has an existing emergency management system due to multiple hazards and risks including hurricanes, wildfires, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, mudslides, etc.
Hawaii has public alerting, warning, and mass notification systems that include sirens but also other delivery methods reportedly including text and email.
The risk of hurricane-wind-driven wildfire was known and documented.
There was an existing drought in the area where the Lahaina wildfire occurred.
The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a Red Flag Warning for high fire danger at some point relative to the Lahaina fire. Of note, this is not typically distributed through public alert, warning, and notification systems.
On the day of the Lahaina incident, high winds moved extremely fast.
The power lines in the area remained active during the high winds. I do not know if there is a protocol to de-activate power lines in the case of high winds in Hawaii as per the power companies and/or state and local government.
De-activating power lines brings risks to life/safety for certain populations and can cause infrastructure and continuity of business interruptions and cascading effects. Some de-activated power lines can still arc and cause fires but the risk level is different.
There were multiple existing wildfires at the time of the fire ignition(s) for the Lahaina fire, and firefighting resources were drawn down. It is not publicly known yet whether mutual aid requests had been made for additional firefighting resources due to the fire risk and existing fire activity; this should come out in after-action reporting.
Due to high winds, power outages and internet/wifi outages began to occur which would have impacted some public alerts, warnings, and notifications capabilities if they were used — especially in terms of residents’ ability to receive notifications.
The National Weather Service (NWS) has warning authority for cell-tower based Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) cell phone weather warnings. Other agencies such as the state of Hawaii or Maui County may or may not have had this specific WEA alerting capability for weather and/or emergency alerts. Local and state government agencies must go through a FEMA approval process and have a contract for WEA-sending technology. These kinds of things should come out in an after-action process. No WEA was known yet to have been sent from NWS or state or local government. WEAs are not typically used for Red Flag Fire Weather Warnings.
Emergency sirens do not appear to have been activated. It is not clear if sirens are electricity dependent although one would assume there are provisions in place to ensure that they would operate in case of a power outage. Had the sirens been activated, it’s not clear that anyone could have heard them through the wind or if there would have been confusion about a possible tsunami as that is their typical warning use. Also, sirens are most frequently intended for outdoor warning use — they are not often considered to be reliable for warning people indoors which is one reason why there are a whole set of alert/warning/notification tools.
Once the fire(s) started, perhaps most likely caused by downed power lines, the fire(s) moved at approximately 60 miles per hour (mph) as that was the speed of the wind. Some reports put wind speeds at 85 mph. That’s one mile per minute.
In Friday’s press conference (more on that in this post here), it sounded like by the time the fire/police/first responders knew about the wildfires — there was not much time for anything. Communication may have already been unreliable for first responders by that time… which would have made it tough to get word to an Emergency Operations Center (EOC) to put out any alerts or warnings such as sirens. Were the communication capabilities clear enough between first responders at the time the fire ignition was discovered to communicate the need for alerting the public? Did they try? Did someone make the call to put out alerts and warnings? We probably won’t know until the after-action reports and investigations.
Did they have staff with access to the system(s) who could put out notifications quickly? Did field staff have the capability or did they need to contact people in an office or EOC to put out public warnings?
Did the right people have authorization to make the decisions — fast?
How much time does it normally take for staff to put out an emergency notification, to send a WEA, or to activate emergency sirens?
Essentially, how much time passed between when the fire(s) was detected and any efforts to warn the public? Were specific decisions made to try to get warnings out, and in what ways? Was there time to get warnings out to the public using normal channels?
Did the first responders seeing the fire ignition or detecting the fire understand fire behavior well enough to understand and act on the danger to the public? This is probably one of the hardest questions and calls for first responders in the field — because as with any extreme disaster, seeing extreme wildfire behavior and understanding its potential is difficult to witness and estimate when you’ve never seen it before but just learned about it. Fire behavior in the US has been changing (intensifying) in the past two decades, but wildland firefighters train on what extreme fire behavior looks like and what it can do. Did the first responders have enough training to recognize the danger? Were they cross-trained in structure fire and wildland fire? Did they have enough fire behavior knowledge to know what was happening?
What public warning attempts were made, and when?
What’s the timeline of the fire spread, if it can be determined through remote imagery (satellite) or other means?
Are there remote sensing systems over Hawaii that help detect wildfire starts? How integrated are those systems with local EOCs?
What systems/software do police, fire, and emergency management staff use for public alerts/warnings/notifications, for mapping, for incident tracking, for resource tracking, and for communication? How accessible are those systems in the field / in remote areas? How integrated and interoperable are these systems between agencies?
And so on. A million questions will come up.
The Wicked Problem of Disaster Decision-Support Information
That’s a whole lot of complicated questions about how this really went down, but none of that fits into a nice neat headline about how sirens may or may not have been activated. All of that is just a start — a good after-action process will dig deeper.
The big picture truth is that the US as a country has not tried to integrate fast-moving disaster intelligence and public information systems in a strategic, comprehensive way.
I know this because I’m one of the people who worked on it for a very, very long time because I saw a very similar situation unfold in the 2003 wildfires in California. People died there, too, running away or trapped because we weren’t able to better integrate our intel about where fires were, what they were doing, and what they were likely to do in time to warn the public. That was the worst on the Cedar Fire in the San Diego area. Plus, at the time we didn’t have as many systems to warn the public as exist now.
Even still, there are about a zillion technologies, systems, and processes for figuring out where incidents are (not just fires), how fast they’re moving, what they’re likely to do, where the response resources are, and where the public is. It’s “intelligence” that both first responders and the public need in a disaster to make decisions. In other words, it’s disaster decision-support information.
It’s four components: situation, resources, incident potential (like fire behavior, hurricane tracks, etc.), and public information.
Plus, behind it all are maps and/or geographic information systems (GIS) and in many cases — remote sensing data, sensors, and imagery. Plus plus, behind and between all of that are techology, sensor, and software systems that do all kinds of things.
Trying to get these components better integrated is a wicked problem is — “a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve.”
At the heart of what went wrong when this Lahaina fire started is this nexus: the wicked problem of better integrating disaster decision-support information/intel.
The problem isn’t going to go away. Disasters are intensifying because we have an increasing world population living increasingly in high-hazard zones in a time of climate change. We’ll need a society that’s willing to work on problem-solving. That work depends on actually seeing the risk landscape for what it is (like not denying climate change), and being willing to invest in government at every level that is forward-leaning and set up to serve its residents.
The authoritarian movement brewing in these United States will do nothing to make wicked problems like this any better. Rather — in an authoritarian regime, these kinds of messes would get worse and impacts from future disasters would be more deadly. More historically underserved and actively oppressed people would pay the price.
Good government exists to be an equalizer and to take care of humans rather than just the most powerful. We need to actively work on that; more so than what we’ve been able to do so far. Things are changing.
This stuff is about our future. We have to change the direction this country is headed in — for the good of the majority of the people who make it up. This nonprofit’s intention is to help with all that. Join us — subscribe here if you haven’t. Support us through our website or ActBlue as we’re running on fumes. Volunteer. Share our stuff with your networks and people. More events are coming as we work behind the scenes with volunteers on the next steps, so stay tuned.
Be safe out there. Try not to get dead. We’ve got shift to do.
We are desperate for information about what happened, what went wrong in Lahaina. You wrote: "Yet it would be helpful for everyone if the media could apply some critical thinking to their reporting." Amen. But that requires media wanting to illuminate and enlighten their readers and viewers. Sadly, for the most part, the 24-hour news cycle means they are already thinking about what they are going to cover next as they are trying to piece together what's going on in front of their eyes, or what has just happened. "What bleeds leads," as they say--and that's never been truer than it is today. There are so many lessons to be learned from understanding what happened--and what didn't happen--in this fire. Determining what the lessons are takes time, and the media's focus will have long-since moved beyond Lahaina. You provided a fairly exhaustive list for where to start, Vanessa. But even if the agencies began to diligently work their way through them, even more would arise. I don't need to tell you how complex this all is! And sadly, we Americans have little patience for the complex. If Shift the Country can help people, ordinary people, understand how much is at stake if we don't start addressing complexity--whether it's wildfire or our broken judicial system or our outdated elections system or how we continue to fail to address the pernicious effects of systemic racism...or what we need to do to save our democracy!...maybe we can start to turn the tables and get back on a path of answering the questions and building a sustainable future.
From a professional Emergency Management perspective, I am curious as to why we can't access their Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) - the most basic of frameworks for responding to disasters and supporting field resources. I'm curious as to why my searching has led me to an inspired, but insufficient, plan that was workshopped and crafted by a private citizen, Joe Pluta, whose profession is in real estate (Google: "West Maui Emergency Plan").
The reason why an EOP is CRITICAL is because it is foundational to Emergency Management's Preparedness sub-cycle that encompasses Planning, Organization, Equipping, Training and Exercise (POETE) - once a jurisdiction has a plan, that plan can be trained to and exercised on. This is critical because Training and Exercise is what develops and socializes an Emergency Management Organization's "muscle memory." It's what identifies capability gaps and allows practitioners to fill voids. I'd want to see PRA'ed After-Action Reports and Improvement Plans (AAR/IP, as prescribed by Homeland Security Exercise and Evaluation Program methodology) to see if any of the response failures were previously identified (e.g., failure to establish delegations of authority, failure to integrate their sirens with their CivicReady mass notification system, failure for the County Fire Department to prioritize mass notifications).
It enrages me that a private citizen even felt the need to craft a plan to support their community; he put in his best efforts, and it's very evident to me that he at least consulted with members of my profession, and that he sought to honor FEMA's Comprehensive Preparedness Guide 101 (CPG 101). These are efforts that local governments should engage upon as a simple exercise in good faith.
It enrages me that a senior government official - a Lieutenant Governor in this case - still has the hutzpah to describe these catastrophic tragedies as "unprecedented." This is 2023 - not 1970. No; none of these catastrophic tragedies are "unprecedented," and the only interpretation of that descriptor is that they failed to see the value in investing in processes and programs that would have served to preserve human life. It enrages me that local fire administration would be so cavalier and negligent as to ascribe a low assessment to a wildfire hazard, and for this to happen; it's as though they haven't looked up the definition for the term "risk" in the dictionary, and they don't understand what the term means.
I hope that with 99 dead and counting, these victims have established precedent in their negligent melons to invest in governmental activities that truly matter in the preservation of human life and their communities.
The citizens of Hawaii require better. They now require transparency and a government that advocates for them.