The Lahaina Fire: A Failure to Communicate

 

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.

In Defense of Ham Radio

A nasty letter from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL-FIRE) to an unnamed amateur radio operator ("ham") has been making the rounds of the Internet.  To understand it, you need to know a little context.

Amateur radio is just that:  people who like operating two-way radios not for profit, but for fun, and also for community-service purposes such as emergency communications.  In disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that decimated New Orleans and its communications infrastructure, amateur radio operators using their portable "rigs" and privately-owned VHF repeater systems managed to help rescuers locate survivors, relayed health and welfare information, and generally made themselves useful during a time when many mobile-phone base stations were knocked out and phone service was nonexistent in many areas. 

Because they have proven so helpful in emergencies, many public-safety government organizations such as police and fire operations have allowed amateurs to install repeaters on towers and in equipment vaults across the country.  While normally, a private entity such as a telecomm company would have to pay good money for such a privilege, amateurs have on occasion worked out agreements whereby they can install their equipment without being charged the usual fees, and in turn the community gets the benefit of their potential for emergency services.

Obviously, such agreements can be changed, and apparently it was one bureaucrat's heavy-handed attempt to clear space in a repeater vault that got the attention of amateur radio operators nationwide, to the extent that their umbrella organization, the quaintly-named American Radio Relay League (ARRL) had to issue a clarification. 

Some time last year, it appears that a group of amateurs who operated a repeater installed in a CAL-FIRE communications facility received a letter demanding payment of several thousand dollars plus an annual rental fee, or else they would have to come and take down their equipment.  With the addressee and date redacted, a copy of this letter gained the attention of several groups, and the ARRL contacted CAL-FIRE for further information. 

It turns out that internal management changes at CAL-FIRE introduced some property management personnel to the unfamiliar world of amateur radio repeaters, which they apparently viewed as simply some people having fun at the taxpayers' expense.  Accordingly, one ill-informed manager named Lorina Pisi drafted and sent the letter, which was not representative of CAL-FIRE's overall attitude toward ham radio in general.  Such situations are negotiated at the local level and other such controversies have come up in the past.  But this letter was egregious enough that it inspired someone to leak it publicly, and it got a lot of attention.

Being an amateur radio licensee myself, I am not exactly a neutral observer.  Admittedly, the exotic aura attached to ham radio has lost some of its luster in the last few decades.  Back when the only people who could communicate with others while in a moving vehicle were policemen, firemen, cab drivers, and the odd millionaire who could afford to pay nearly an infinite amount for the five or ten mobile-phone channels available in a city like New York, having a rig in your car, let alone being able to talk over a wide area with a handheld radio operating through a repeater, was a thrill worth studying for, because getting a license was a substantial ordeal involving learning Morse code and knowing a minimum of technical information about radio science. 

But with the advent of commercial cellular mobile-phone networks, anybody who could afford a phone could talk from their car, and so it's understandable that people whose only experience with ham radio is possibly the crochety old uncle with a pile of electronics under his dashboard would think that with everybody having mobile phones, ham radio is just a hobby and no longer potentially useful for public service in emergencies.

And it is just a hobby for some people.  But there is a small but dedicated group of amateurs who practice emergency communications with drills, procedures, and other means of being ready to spring into action if a natural disaster strikes such as Katrina.  The disaster most relevant to the California situation is the self-imposed blackouts that PG&E has imposed in areas where their lines on poorly-maintained right-of-way can cause wildfires during windy weather.  In defense of PG&E, the reason they haven't trimmed more trees away from their lines is a combination of financial straits and environmental laws that perversely make such fires more likely. 

Even if PG&E didn't impose blackouts, California has plenty of other potential disasters—earthquakes, landslides—in which amateur radio could come in quite handy.  The point here is that while most of the time, amateur radio folks seem to be just playing, their hobby can become a vital necessity in certain rare and critical situations.  So I for one would like to see them defended against any movement on the part of goverments to abrogate agreements regarding repeater space on towers and in vaults, or other government-mandated conditions with wider implications.

For example, the lifeblood of amateur radio is the portions of the frequency spectrum allocated to their operations.  No allocations, no amateur radio.  In the last few decades, the spectrum has increasingly been viewed in economic terms, with auctions and sales of bandwidth becoming routine. Amateur radio operators, who not only don't have profits to spend on bandwidth but are legally enjoined from making any money with their hobby, can't pay for their frequencies, so they must rely on other justifications for their existence, and one of the main ones is their role as a backup communications means in emergencies. 

I hope the CAL-FIRE letter doesn't represent a wider trend in government against amateur radio in general, and the ARRL, at least, doesn't seem to think it does.  Nevertheless, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and it seems to me that we should do what we can to encourage hams to continue in their role as providers of a backup communications means when all others fail.

Sources:  My wife directed my attention to a rather colorful writeup of the original CAL-FIRE letter carried by the website Offgridsurvival.com at https://offgridsurvival.com/california-officials-declare-ham-radio-no-longer-a-benefit/?fbclid=IwAR0DkHc4fJAKnbP82tyyqTLaVAfItdh35YeT43hP7IxJaHJz7uZ6Myam32A.  A more even-handed view was taken in this report:  https://californiaglobe.com/section-2/cal-fire-severing-ties-with-ham-radio-operators-jeopardizing-millions-of-californians-during-an-emergency/.  And the ARRL's response to the controversy can be viewed at http://www.arrl.org/news/report-causes-concern-and-confusion-in-california-s-amateur-radio-ranks.  For an article about how ham operators helped out during Hurricane Katrina, see

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9228945/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/t/ham-radio-operators-rescue-after-katrina/#.XrfR2xNKhXg