We think of Hawaii as being the stereotypical island paradise, where the weather is always ideal and nothing major can go wrong. But on Monday, Aug. 7, the weather forecast on the island of Maui for Tuesday included near-hurricane-force winds of up to 65 mph (105 kph). Combined with an unusually dry summer, this forecast meant that any fires which might start would spread, well, like wildfire.
Sure enough, shortly after Tuesday began, a little after midnight a fire in Maui's central Upcountry region was reported, and emergency management officials ordered some evacuations. This fire attracted the attention of safety and fire officials throughout most of the day Tuesday.
In comparison to most other parts of the U. S., Hawaii is well equipped to notify its residents of emergency situations such as fires, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions. An extensive network of alert sirens blankets the occupied parts of the islands, as well as electronic notifications that can be given through legacy media such as radio and TV as well as social media (Facebook, X—ex-Twitter‚ and so on). So one would think that even a rapidly-spreading wildfire would not be able to keep residents from evacuating promptly.
Think again. The historic town of Lahaina sits on the western coast of Maui and is accessible by only three main roads that go along the coastline. Nestled between the ocean and the mountains, Lahaina was an attractive tourist destination with historic structures. The following timeline was reported by the Associated Press.
When a second fire started near Lahaina before 7 A. M. Tuesday, firefighters converged on it and reported that it was contained by 11 A. M. However, the fires had knocked out power to much of Lahaina and surrounding areas, which may have included cell towers.
The Upcountry fire continued to occupy the attention of officials even after the Lahaina fire escaped containment some time after noon. By 3:30 PM, the fire's progress made officials decide to close the Lahaina Bypass road, one of the three main routes out of Lahaina.
Around that time was when the Lahaina fire exploded. Very few residents reported receiving any warning about the fire before it showed up at their doorstep.
Survivors describe cars in the downtown area being surrounded by flames, smelling smoke one minute and seeing their houses engulfed the next, and fleeing along the Lahaina Bypass only to be turned back by the roadblock. Up until 4:30 PM, virtually nothing appeared about the Lahaina fire on any communications medium, and residents report that the sirens never sounded.
At 4:30 P. M., residents of an inland subdivision of Lahaina were instructed by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency to evacuate to a civic center north of town. But by then, much of the damage had been done, and the fire continued to spread toward the coastline. By 5:20, the Lahaina Bypass roadblock was lifted, but by then many residents of Front Street near the coast had fled to the shoreline and were either treading water in the ocean or hiding on the shore away from the worst of the flames. More announcements came warning residents of Lahaina to shelter in place, but if your place is going up in flames, that's not good advice.
At this writing (Sunday morning Aug. 13), the death toll stands at 80, making this natural disaster one of the worst in Hawaii's recent history. While it is too soon to make a thorough assessment of what went wrong, experience and the little we know now can help us make some preliminary judgments.
First, the Lahaina fire wasn't the only emergency happening that day. The earlier Upcountry fire engaged the attention of emergency management personnel to the extent that information from Lahaina may not have been acted upon as fast as it might have been otherwise.
Second, the widespread power failure may have crippled a number of electronic communications systems. Sirens may or may not have backup power sources so that they will work when utility power fails. If the ones in Lahaina didn't have backup power and the power was out, this would explain why no one heard sirens before the fire. Also, although most cell tower stations have some form of backup power, the emergency power source doesn't always work properly. And a cell tower with its ground-level equipment engulfed in flames is unlikely to be of much help anyway.
Third, it is pretty clear that some well-intentioned actions of officials actually made things worse. Closure of a road that has smoke from fires crossing it is a prudent measure, as tragic traffic accidents on interstates suddenly enveloped in smoke attest. But when the people needing to use the road are fleeing for their lives, that should take precedence over lesser considerations, if the officials in charge know what is going on. It looks like the Lahaina fire moved so fast that it was hard for officials (or anyone else) to know what was happening.
One reason that overall global deaths from natural disasters have been declining for the last several decades is that electronic communications can give advance warning to people who would otherwise be in harm's way. Tornado fatalities in the U. S., for example, can be averted by timely warnings of specific storms that include likely localities to be affected.
Unlike tornadoes, fires can't be tracked by radar, at least not yet. Until such technology is available, fire and safety officials have to rely on eyewitness reports to take appropriate actions, whether that consists of warnings, evacuation orders, or dispatch of fire-fighting resources. The speed with which the high winds spread the Lahaina fire is unusual, but not unprecedented. Clearly, the system of fire warning and protection was unprepared for what happened.
Lessons learned from the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks about the failure of electronic emergency communications led to widespread improvements in interoperability and design of first-responder communications systems, as I wrote in a paper published in 2007. We can hope that the sad lessons learned from the Lahaina fire will lead to upgrades in equipment and changes in policies that will make the emergency response to the next wildfire in Hawaii more robust, leading to more lives and property saved.
Sources: I referred to an AP report published by PBS at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/as-death-toll-of-maui-wildfires-rises-to-80-a-timeline-of-failed-communications-emerges and a map of the fire extent at
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/satellite-images-show-scale-hawaii-wildfires-devastation/. My paper "We've Got to Talk: Emergency Communications and Engineering Ethics" was published in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 26, no. 3 pp. 42-48, Fall 2007.
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