Maui’s Fire Risk Was Glowing Red
When the wildfire came ripping down into the town of Lahaina, Maui’s state-of-the-art emergency sirens did not sound. That much is sure.
In the immediate aftermath of the fire, officially the deadliest in modern U.S. history, the decision not to sound these alarms has been one of the more baffling ones. Sirens are supposed to warn people, and shouldn’t more people have been warned by any means necessary? The official in charge of making the call, Herman Andaya, resigned Thursday, citing health reasons. And yet, under pressure, officials have also defended their decision not to sound the island’s sirens.
Whether they should have is a more complicated question than it might seem—even wildfire-evacuation experts I talked with were divided on it. Communication with the public is one of the most important parts of a wildfire evacuation, but sirens? Sirens are tricky.
[Read: We’re in an age of fire]
Tom Cova, who has been studying fire evacuation since the early 1990s, told me that he understood the argument in favor of using the sirens, and against. Such alerts, he explained, wake people up and can get them talking, seeking information—maybe even seeing fire or smoke for themselves. But a big, loud noise doesn’t answer questions such as what the best route out is or which roads are closed. In a case like the Maui fires, where little information was available and key routes seem to have been blocked, he wondered whether sirens might’ve simply created the same traffic jam survivors have reported being stuck in earlier.
Officials worried that people would confuse the sirens for a tsunami warning and run uphill—which in this case, would have been toward the fire. Erica Kuligowski, a professor who has been studying disaster-warning sirens for years, told me that such sirens are best used when the local population is trained to know exactly what they mean—and they’re accompanied by further messaging, such as an emergency text. Even if residents could be taught what sirens mean, Lahaina needs to think about its tourist population: You can’t train a tourist to know how to behave when a siren goes off. “They may be from Tornado Alley, and they’re visiting Maui,” Kuligowski told me over Zoom, from Australia. “And that siren means to take shelter in their home.”
The sirens were not the only tool officials had; they are a single flash point in the much larger conversation about how the Maui government handled evacuations from the deadly fire. Many survivors have reported getting no form of notification whatsoever. What happened there? Why were parts of a key escape route reportedly blocked? What happened in the nine hours between the fire’s ignition and its expansion? The fire was first reported at 6:30 a.m., and later that morning, officials sent out an alert saying that it was 100 percent contained. Flames didn’t sweep across the town of Lahaina until late afternoon. What unfolded in the interim? Why didn’t emergency officials partially evacuate—even if such evacuations would’ve been preemptive—given how disturbing the wind was that day?
Disaster response is a series of choices made by officials with very little time and under pressure. Preparation matters. So does experience. Already, as the facts come into view, they show that this was far from a perfect wildfire evacuation, if such a thing exists. And yet experts I talked to stressed that they are waiting for more information to fully assess what happened—and that Maui’s emergency managers were struggling with a bad fire, in a place that might have dealt with wildfire before, but never like this. A week ago, no one in the fire community would have predicted that the deadliest fire in modern American history would take place in Hawaii. It’s as if the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history hit the West Coast and not the Gulf. “Another thought experiment might be like, What if Reno had a tsunami?” Cova suggested.
[Photos: Lahaina, after the fire]
This fire was unprecedented. And yet unprecedented is the new normal. As Enrico Ronchi, an associate professor in evacuation modeling at Lund University, in Sweden, put it, “We are continuously crossing the bar of what we have seen until now.” Any community would have likely struggled with a fire like this, evacuation experts told me. In 2018, the Camp Fire—also a fast-moving fire on a dangerously gusty day—torched the town of Paradise, California, killing at least 85 people. Until last week, it was the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Paradise was located in a fire-prone area of California. The town had a plan—and a good one at that. Cova would’ve given Paradise’s plan an A-plus. “Even the best-prepared communities can be overwhelmed,” he said. “Since Paradise, no one has been dealt a hand as bad as the Maui emergency managers and firefighters.”
What if the community had been more like one in California, where emergency managers and residents both have more firsthand experience with fire? “It’s hard to say… ,” Ronchi told me, hesitating. “It probably would not be the same story.” That doesn’t mean it would’ve been “a happy ending necessarily,” he said, but preparation does matter.
Researchers told me that every community might want to start thinking about a wildfire-evacuation plan, but especially those at high risk of fire. The U.S. Forest Service and the USDA offer a website that maps the wildfire risk across the United States. When I input Maui County, it glowed red—at higher risk than 80 percent of counties in the U.S.
Just because something is “unprecedented” doesn’t mean it is unpredictable. “We keep hearing from certain elected officials and other people being quoted in the media, ‘we had no idea, this is unprecedented,’” Elizabeth Pickett, a co–executive director of the Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, told the Honolulu Civil Beat last week. “But actually, those of us in the wildfire community, meaning our fire agencies, our forestry natural resource management community, we have long been working to increase our risk reduction efforts.”
Pickett has been at this for 15 years. She’s well aware that Hawaii is a fire-prone state, and has been pushing for better education. (One Hawaii-based researcher called her “the backbone of the wildfire community” there.) She told me that, in the past, she’s knocked on the doors of elected officials and handed them fire-risk maps for their district. “Maui is like the canary in the coal mine for our state,” she said over the phone on Friday. “It’s not a one off.” The goal cannot be just about getting communities in Hawaii up to speed with best practices elsewhere; fast-moving fires are requiring us all to plan differently. “We need to have a whole new conversation about evacuation,” she said. “Let’s acknowledge the reality of how fast this went.”
And what else can we do but prepare, with all the time and effort that takes? A good evacuation plan includes a full communication plan, with predrafted alerts and plenty of contingency plans. Early warning is key. Multiple evacuation routes should be thought through, roads and intersections perhaps optimized for a quick escape. Temporary refuge areas—extra-hardened school gymnasiums, for example—can be created as last-resort shelters. Experts stressed in particular the importance of planning for the most vulnerable: people without cars, children and older people, people with limited mobility, people who don’t speak the local language, people with disabilities. Tourists are also considered vulnerable. Many of those who died during the Camp Fire fell into one or more of these categories.
Nowadays, sophisticated evacuation-simulation programs allow planners to better draw up and evaluate their plans. Researchers can input information about a town (the type of vegetation, the type of homes, the traffic layout) and its residents (population, age, other demographics), and model how different fires might sweep through a community. Emergency planners can run these simulations over and over again, and see how traffic builds up under different scenarios, and who survives. They can leverage this technology to test if their plan actually gets everyone out.
We don’t even know how many people died on Maui yet, much less who or how or whose fault it was. But their stories are starting to trickle out. Sixty-eight-year-old Franklin Trejos was trapped in the backseat of his vehicle, on top of a beloved golden retriever, whom he died trying to protect; a friend of his found his bones. Seven-year-old Tony Takafua was found with his mother and his grandparents in a car near their home.
This is what’s at stake. This is wildfire.