A spokesman for Hawaii’s emergency management agency says that none of the 80 warning sirens placed around the island were activated at any time during the wildfire that has caused massive damage and taken at least 93 lives. The historic city of Lahaina has been all but destroyed, as has much of the western part of the island.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green says it isn’t known whether infrastructure damage prevented the sirens from going off. But the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency’s spokesman, Adam Weintraub, confirmed on Saturday that the sirens alone would not have been a sign to evacuate, but for residents to seek more information.
He said other alert systems were activated, including emergency alerts that were sent to cellphones and to radio and TV stations, but there were power outages in Lahaina on Tuesday, and many residents said they never got any warnings.
Mr. Weintraub said the agency would be cooperating with Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez in the investigation of the response of state and local officials.
“The emergency sirens are tested once a month, but they weren’t sounded for some unknown reason to announce these fires,” Robin Ritchie, a long-time Lahaina resident said. “That makes me feel very angry because the lack of warning has definitely caused death.” Ritchie says that two of her friends were saved from the approaching fire only when the smoke alarms in their homes went off.
Roughly 2,170 acres burned in the catastrophic blaze that broke out Tuesday and ravaged Lahaina, according to initial assessments from the Pacific Disaster Center and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
More than 150 FEMA personnel have been deployed to Maui, the agency said Saturday, with assistance from over a dozen other federal agencies and departments. The National Guard has activated 134 troops to help with firefighting.
There was a report from a company that monitors power grid activity that a “large fault” was detected on a power line 20 minutes before the wildfire started. It may very well have been a coincidence since residents were reporting power outages all throughout Tuesday.
The Lahaina wildfire was one of four that sprang up Tuesday in the region, officials said. It started as an early brush fire that firefighters thought they had under control by 9 a.m.
By afternoon, the Lahaina fire had flared again. It became a major blaze that destroyed or damaged thousands of structures, many of which were residential, officials said. Some residents were forced to plunge into the Pacific Ocean in a frantic bid to stay alive. The U.S. Coast Guard said it rescued 17 people from the water.
Lori Moore-Merrell, head of the U.S. Fire Administration, said the Lahaina fire burned fast and low.
“Heat and wind speed. Those two things are coupled, so you are going to see those things are driving the pace of the fire.”
The wildfires were not entirely unexpected. In fact, the state’s electric utility, Hawaii Electric, had for years worried about wildfire risk in the area, going so far as to launch drones. Considering that Maui had a top-of-the-line warning system, the state was ill-prepared for the disaster.
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Here’s an aerial view of the disaster:
A passenger on a plane captured the devastating wildfire that decimated the historic town of Lahaina, Maui.pic.twitter.com/h262jX92yq
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) August 10, 2023
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