More than 110 persons have been killed and numbers much larger are still missing in a wildfire that engulfed the town of Lahaina in Hawaii, US. The death count is really big, and yet no questions are being raised over organisational structure, planning, preparedness, and other related issues that would have crippled the responders in this part of the globe.
The Agency
Yes, they have Hawaii Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) in place and it serves as the official emergency management agency for the state of Hawaii, and is the primary coordinating agency between the state and the four county emergency management agencies of Kauai, Honolulu, Maui, and Hawaii.
When state resources are exhausted, HI-EMA also serves as the primary coordinating agency between the state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
The System
To add to it HI-EMA and the state of Hawaii follow the National Incident Management System (NIMS) model, which dictates that incident response should be handled at the lowest level possible. NIMS can well be understood as being akin to what we know as being Incident Response System (IRS). Both NIMS and IRS have evolved out of Incident Command System (ICS) of US Forest Service that was initially utilised for controlling wildfires and popularised by the logo of Smokey Bear.
Risk Assessment
HI-EMA routinely undertakes hazard, risk and vulnerability assessments and accordingly prepares Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan (CEMP) for the state of Hawaii, and the latest one was prepared in February, 2022 and it really is a detailed document consisting of 05 volumes covering Business Process, Preparedness, Response, Mitigation and Recovery.
HI-EMA would have certainly utilised state of art tools and techniques including GIS, RS, AI and ML for the assessments, and put in place necessary early detection, warning generation and dissemination protocols and implements.
Wildfire – Low Hazard
CEMP however assessed hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, flood, health risk and cyber threat as posing high risk to the people of Hawaii, while the risk posed by wildfire was assessed as being low.
It is no surprise therefore that HI-EMA’s public resources webpage lays out clear, bullet-point recommendations on what residents should do in the event of hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, or flash flood. At the bottom of the page, the agency includes two short paragraphs about wildfires – with no similar advice on ways to stay safe.
Wildfire Threat
Not that nothing was ever done to assess the threat of wildfires. In fact the Maui County that houses Lahaina town prepared a comprehensive report on wildfire prevention and cost of recovery in July 2021.
The report outlines that wild/brush/forest fires present a growing threat to Maui County citizen safety and property. It highlights the vulnerability of island communities that often tend to be clustered and dependent on single highways, often located on the island edge.
This report examined (i) wildfire fighting operations budgets; (ii) firefighter risk and liability; and (iii) future wildfire fighting costs, including staffing and equipment needs for the Island of Maui.
The report outlines that the number of incidents from a combination of wild/brush/forest fires are increasing, and these pose an increased threat to citizens, properties, and sacred sites
The report revealed that current budgets, combined with County and State access to Federal emergency relief funding, are adequate to meet the current fire threat, but are inadequate for an effective fire prevention and mitigation program.
It was recognized that the implementation of the recommendations would necessitate an increase in personnel, equipment, and cost. However, the threat from island wild/brush/forest fires was clearly forecasted to increase.
The Current Disaster
The disaster began to unfold in the midnight of 8 August 2023 when a brush fire was reported in the town of Kula, some 56 km from Lahaina. About five hours later that morning, power was knocked out in Lahaina.
By that afternoon, however, the situation had turned dire. At approximately 3:30 PM local time on 9 August 2023, the Lahaina fire suddenly flared up. Some residents began evacuating while people, including hotel guests, on the town’s west side were instructed to shelter in place.
Sirens stationed around the island, around 80 in number – intended to warn of impending natural disasters – never sounded and widespread power and cellular outages hampered other forms of alerts. It is being contended that the sirens were meant primarily to issue warning of Tsunami and sounding these would have prompted people to approach mountainside that would have further detoriorated the situation.
In the ensuing hours, the county posted a series of evacuation orders on Facebook as the fire spread through the town, but these failed to reach the majority of the population.
There was however little advance notice, while the blaze consumed Lahaina in what seemed a matter of minutes. Several people were forced to leap into the Pacific Ocean to save themselves
The Lahaina evacuation was reportedly complicated by its coastal location next to hills, meaning there were only two ways out. Moreover fleeing motorists were forced by road blockade to take onto a narrow downtown street, creating a bottleneck that was quickly taken over by flames from all sides.
It is being described as a nightmarish confluence of factors, including communications network failures, powerful wind gusts from an offshore hurricane and a separate wildfire dozens of miles away, that made it nearly impossible to coordinate in real time with the emergency management agencies that would typically issue warnings and evacuation orders.
It is being termed as the biggest disaster to hit Hawaii and with the search operations not yet over and hundreds still missing, the death toll is sure to rise. Apart from huge economic resources required to rebuild Lahaina, this disaster is to severely cripple the local economy that is largely dependent on tourism.
Lessons
We may boast of having disaster management plans from nation to state and district level, but these are nothing more that compendium of general information – geography, geology, weather, transport network, civic amenities, previous disasters, details of officials and lack location and hazard specific actionable items.
It is therefore no surprise that these are not consulted during most emergency situations.
Moreover, we have considered disasters as being restricted to remote and sparsely populated areas, and have not conceived disaster situations in urban centres where the situation is sure to be highly complicated by concentration of population, traffic congestion, and unplanned and unsafe construction.
Moreover, but for Tsunami and weather related alerts, cyclone included, we have no early warning for any other hazard, and dissemination through recently launched common alert protocol (CAP) has been far from satisfactory.
Not sure of the exact reasons thereof – long recurrence period being one and being overwhelmed by recurring local disasters being another – we have long been ignoring earthquake safety knowing petty well that it is the most devastating hazard that we have to face in near future. Earthquake is going to hit hard our urban centres and situation is to be further complicated by sudden shutdown of most civic amenities and public safety measures.
So we have to plan meticulously, particularly for urban disasters and invest in bringing forth redundancy in not only warning dissemination but also in early detection and warning generation for various hazards to which we are vulnerable, considering even low risk hazards and not overlooking these as was done in Hawaii.
With 15th Finance Commission’s liberal recommendations having been accepted by the Central Government, huge resources have been dedicatedly made available to the state governments for this very purpose. What is required now is to plan and implement a systematic and phased strategy for risk assessment, risk communication and risk reduction, with particular focus on urban centres.
Excellent
beautiful drafted
Great work