The Hawaii fires didn’t have to be that bad

A Day Before the Fires Went Off: The Chief of the Maui Emergency Management Agency Has Residualized and Will Not Revisit Its Emergency System

The chief of the Maui Emergency Management Agency has resigned, effective immediately, the mayor’s office announced on Thursday. Herman Andaya’s departure was sudden a day after he defended not using outdoor alert sirens during the fires.

Mr. Andaya cited health reasons as reason for his departure, the mayor’s statement said. “Given the gravity of the crisis we are facing, my team and I will be placing someone in this key position as quickly as possible and I look forward to making that announcement soon,” Mayor Richard Bissen said.

The official death toll has reached 111 people and is expected to climb. Maui County has publicly identified five people, four of whom were older than 70. The Maui County police chief said that the children were believed to be among the dead, but they had not yet been identified.

The painstaking search for human remains through a burn area of ash and debris in Lahaina will probably continue for at least another week. At least 40 percent of the area had been scoured as of Thursday morning.

The number of people who received text alert may not have been as great because power and cellular disruptions may have prevented them from getting them. Some tourists in Lahaina said there was an emergency alert to their cellphones for the first time that they heard of the fire. Many local residents have said that they didn’t know the flames were approaching until the fire was nearby. The New York Times states that by 5:19 p.m. the fire had reached the waterfront, and that people were seeking shelter in the water.

Many people did not receive cellphone alerts telling them to evacuate because Maui emergency officials did not use a system of outdoor alert sirens. By the time they realized they had to flee, the main highway connecting the town with the rest of the island was choked with traffic.

A day before Mr. Andaya resigned, he defended his agency’s decision not to use the sirens on the afternoon of Aug. 8. He said on Wednesday that the outdoor alert system along the coastline has been used to direct people toward the hills to escape a tsunami, and that he feared that sounding the sirens this time would send many residents heading toward the flames.

With very little time to leave, some people never escaped their homes, and others died in their cars as they tried to flee. A number of residents felt that jumping into the ocean was their best option in order to avoid being caught up in the fire and smoke, as well as not breathing in the noxious smoke.

This fire was likely spread from the road to the beach because of slope and wind conditions, just like any other fire. In Mati, Greece, in 2018, a fire took about half an hour to cover one-half mile. The conditions there were similar to Maui’s, with very strong winds descending from the local mountains and pushing the fire forward. In Mati, there was no warning; 104 people died and roughly another 800 were trapped by the beach and had to be evacuated from the water. With an alert system, those lives might not have been lost. Another tragedy could have been prevented.

Islands have a disadvantage because reinforcements have to be flown in and may take a long time to arrive. There is a better way to go. Europe has succeeded in placing firefighters in high risk areas during the hot and dry summer months. Hiring seasonal firefighters has also helped some communities there and elsewhere prepare. Hawaii, with help from the federal government, could improve its firefighting resources in these ways, too.