A state official refused to release water for West Maui fires
civilbeat.org
civilbeat.org
In some situations, it turns into a flaw. "Computer says no"
This played out in Queensland over a flood which had a dam release issue, and went to law between 2 agencies, the government overall, and the affected businesses and householders who were flooded. The case had to be tried in another states courts, to avoid systematic bias issues.
Of course you need to stick to the rulebook. But the rulebook needs to be written to handle unforseen situations, which might be hard, but not impossible. Put it up the food chain, or provide from some limited relief from risk.
So, the emergency sirens weren't used because "they aren't for this function" and now we have "can't approve the water release" -Sounds like the reaction of somebody who is concerned they will answer for a decision not explicitly covered in the rulebook.
Or, they simply didn't understand their role, and their authority to act. Which of course, should be explained in the rulebook.
[edit: people are pointing out there were huge risks in using the sirens, and the rulebook was really explicit, and the community understood their narrow intent. So, its probably a bad example of my hypothesised "rulebook says no" thing]
They weren't used because the website [1] specifically says that in the event of a siren you should "if you in a low laying area near the coastline; evacuate to high grounds, inland".
This would directly route people towards the fire not away. And given that tsunamis can sometimes trigger fire it easily could have caused confusion in some.
It definitely wasn't a clear decision as some like to make out.
[1] https://dod.hawaii.gov/hiema/all-hazard-statewide-outdoor-wa...
What often happens is the rulebook is amended. Add a new siren-tone, modify the instructions to turn on a radio or TV and get more specific advice, something changes, to reflect the new understanding.
Or not. Sometimes, you can't fix this. The sirens are for tsunamis and some other system is needed for wildfires.
Which risk do you think is more likely, and more consequential in the medium to short term? I don't know, I don't have the answers here. But I do believe, people in Lahaina probably wanted to be alerted, somehow to the risk.
What do you think?
What did this question mean?
This would be a bit more convincing if it wasn't written by a random pseudonym account.
Right now it seems silly since it can't possibly help improve your account's credibility, in fact most likely it will do the opposite.
Typically HN users don't write random responses to a comment they didn't understand. But if you were literally just putting some words down for the sake of replying with something, (for what reason?), then I'm not really sure how to take that.
> They weren't used because the website [1] specifically says that in the event of a siren you should "if you in a low laying area near the coastline; evacuate to high grounds, inland".
+1 to this. Everyone on the island knows those sirens. I was there in 2011 when the sirens went off to warn about the incoming tsunami from the Tohoku earthquake[0]. We packed sandwiches and water, and headed for high ground along with everyone else.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...
the better to lure sailors onto the rocks!
(the word Siren comes from Greek mythology, Siren's were "humanlike beings with very alluring voices, they appear in a scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus" stops "the ears of his crew with wax so that they were deaf to the Sirens. Odysseus himself wanted to hear their song but had himself tied to the mast so that he would not be able to steer the ship off its course."
in latin languages such as Italian, "mermaid" is "la sirena")
Unless the response to the siren is the exact same thing, you can't use the siren for more than one thing.
Sounds like something that would have to be done when installing (well, really speccing and buying) them.
Does result in a strange "echo" because you hear other sirens talking delayed by the distance they are placed. But it does mean they can give extra info (e.g. during tests).
One long for high ground three short for… huh, that’s new. What do? Oh it says here, fire get out now.
you just added a dependency for something that only had one meaning.
The patterns were published in the phone books, so the phone book's deprecation didn't help keep things going.
And so, the sirens' use got simplified, with the side effect of "oh crap, we no longer have a way to tell people about different emergencies".
I hope the use of the sirens to indicate more than one thing is brought back.
Hawaii's use of mobile phone notifications do not have a good track record for those of us only hearing about how they don't work. At least they did not receive incoming nuclear attack messages to throw even more chaos into the situation
This will happen whenever an infrequent event happens. A large earthquake hits the British islands, complete clusterfuck, japan, they handle it. A hurricane hits Florida, they are used to it. southern California, everybody goes insane.
The all-hazard siren system can be used for a variety of both natural and human-caused events; including tsunamis, hurricanes, dam breaches, flooding, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, terrorist threats, hazardous material incidents, and more.
What about all the other emergency communication systems that exist?
We get Amber and Silver alerts directly on our cell phones. Heck, I've received "poor air quality" alerts even. There's also the classic emergency frequency stuff for radio/tv.
Why were none of those mechanisms used? Or were they, and they're just not being reported on?
https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/08/maui-emergency-chief-defen...
> The all-hazard siren system can be used for a variety of both natural and human-caused events; including tsunamis, hurricanes, dam breaches, flooding, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, terrorist threats, hazardous material incidents, and more.
> When a siren tone is heard other than a scheduled test, tune into local Radio/TV/Cable stations for emergency information and instructions by official authorities.
The all-hazard siren system can be used for a variety of both natural and human-caused events; including tsunamis, hurricanes, dam breaches, flooding, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, terrorist threats, hazardous material incidents, and more.
it’s plausible, until you take into account that this emergency occurred in the middle of the night when many residents were asleep. And cell towers were offline by this point, so there was literally no other way to alert people in west maui.
The risk that some residents are stupid enough to run into a fire uphill seems WAY better than letting one thousand plus people die in their sleep.
if you stick to a rulebook you can be covered for indemnity and if you divert from a rulebook you are on your own
In other words, if breaking the rules is the prudent thing to do, you aren’t just empowered to break the rules, you are required to. There is no such thing as stand your ground rules at sea.
Of those I like 2 and 3 the best. For 2, it can help influence them to make better decisions (i.e., seek more training ahead of time). For 3, it seems to be the most fair to the person in charge.
It’s helped by making a mistake usually doesn’t leave someone alive to yell at.
I think the sirens were a good call and a bad example of what you want to state.
Becuase it is established that people (would) associate the sirens with a tusnami warning. Their anticipated action would under this assumption to seek higher ground. Where the fire was. (See for yourself: https://old.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/15vfw26/...)
I'm from germany and here sirens here have been assigned with the "turn the fucking radio on NOW" behaviour. In my city there is a siren drill every other month to get you aware, my city only skipped it out of sensibility one time for the ukranian refugees directly after the war to give them some peace.
For more emergent situations we have Emergency Apps like "Nina" and "KatWarn" + Mobile Push Systems to alert you precisely about the kind of emergency/danger you are facing. My city for example has a WW2 Bomb found every other week, meaning thousands of people get evacuated for a time and need get informed.
We have a commenter here who lived on Maui who says that the behavior on hearing the siren is hard coded, not something people second guess. If you hesitate when there's a tsunami, you die.
Personally, I'm not qualified to have an opinion on this, not living on Maui, so I'll defer to the locals rather than the armchair emergency response managers.
In the absence of outside input, driving can just as easily be more dangerous than staying where you are.
I'll quote this from the Wikipedia article of the June 2017 wildfires in Portugal:
> The majority of deaths took place in the Pedrógão Grande municipality, when a fire swept across a road filled with evacuees escaping in their cars.
> 47 people died in or near their cars when a fire overtook the area; 30 people died while trapped in their vehicles while the other 17 died nearby trying to escape on foot.
It is suspected that they could have died from smoke inhalation rather than from the subsequent burn. But it is clear that many, if not all of them, could have survived if they hadn't tried to escape by car, because those who didn't try to escape did survive, and many of the houses were actually unaffected.
But yes, it could have easily been the opposite, as it happened in the same wildfire on another municipality.
And I would say it's quite possible that, in the absence of outside input, trying to escape by car could give you the greatest chances of surviving in most circumstances. But I'm not an expert so I really can't say that for sure.
And I'm sure it would also depend on the geography, the roads, and where the fire is.
The roads in Hawaii are not high speed in any sense of the word. It took me a couple of hours to get from Lahaina to the airport on the one trip I have taken there. This is typical, as the group I was was with were regulars there and knew to leave hours in advance. The roads are 2 lanes with one in either direction. One of the streets was so close to the ocean, the larger waves were lapping onto the street. Even during that trip, I was thinking to myself that this is not a place I would want to be trying to a make an emergency trip by car.
is it common to still have a radio? or where do you go instead now?
The reason that I don't find discussions of the Trolley Problem very interesting is that we as a society have largely solved for it already: If you take responsibility and change the default state, it is your fault - if you leave it alone, it is nobody's.
Are you meaning in Queensland or Maui?
> This is a classic case of disaster capitalism: a small elite
> group using a profound human tragedy as their window to roll
> back a hard-won grassroots victory for water rights, while
> removing civil servants who pose a political inconvenience
> to the administration’s pro-developer agenda.
how is this applicable to chernobyl?
It was disgusting. I’m reserving any judgment on this story, no matter how incendiary the headline, until more facts come out.
(as per cratermoon's post, which seems stuck at the bottom on this page though)
In the case of the water they were trading off the water potentially saving lives vs the water being available to grow taro. It was not a tough call and the dude got it wrong.
The water situation is not obvious and I imagine hard to decide about in the middle of a crisis.
For some additional context:
I know from living in California, and before that Australia, that there is a tension between protecting property structures (or merely forestalling their fate) vs a more macro use of resources to contain the spread. This is the same impetus that will cause a firebreak to be cut through a forest even if it requires the use of eminent domain.
This same calculus leads to the opposite class of decision in urban areas: firefighting used to be a subscription service (in parts of the USA it still is) but the problem is that if your neighbor doesn't have insurance your house could be at risk. So it made more sense to be tax supported and cover people who "don't subscribe".
In the urban case the amount of water is typically low (single structure fire). In a case like this one you have to figure out where to invest your resources and it isn't always obvious.
As the article points out, past misuse (protection of cash crops over the livelihood of workers) has complicated the process of making these decisions in real time.
I am not familiar with what happened to make any judgement, just linking the part 2.
I don't know what this sentence even means.
I guess there are small farmers who think the big landowners should suffer small fire, rather than using up scarce water that they want. I guess that's a reasonable position, as long as the fires are small.
"DLNR delayed releasing water requested by West Maui Land Co. to help prevent the spread of fire, sources familiar with the situation said."
The priority should be to stop the spread of fire not prevent houses being burned down.
Using water to help isolate an area that is used for evacuation is much more important than saving a few houses which are likely to be insured and can be simply rebuilt.
I truly hope my assumption is wrong and that those 800 people are safe, but it just doesn't seem likely to me given what we know.
"DLNR delayed releasing water (requested by West Maui Land Co. to help prevent the spread of fire)"
not
"(DLNR delayed releasing water requested by West Maui Land Co.) to help prevent the spread of fire"
>>The priority should be to stop the spread of fire not prevent houses being burned down.
This would imply you think DLNR should have released the water the West Maui Land Co. as they were using it to "help prevent the spread of fire" (direct quote from your quote). Yet you say at the beginning.
>>Reading the article this seems perfectly fine.
Do you believe DLNR acted appropriately by not releasing the water which increased the spread of fire or do you believe DLNR should have released the water to help stop the spread of fire?
That said, I think the intentional choice to not use sirens was likely a good call in this case and an example of good leadership. If the community is conditioned to recognize the sirens for tsunami’s only maybe that’s where the reform should start. If they CAN be used for other things, can they have different sounds for different things. It doesn’t need to be complicated.
Many Maui Komohana communities refuse to accept WML’s rewriting of history.
They know, for example, it was actually high winds that prevented helicopters
from fighting the fires, and when they were ultimately used, seawater proved
more accessible.
The Guardian article seems to paint things in a very different light to the OP article.
Some examples: http://paaponomilolii.org/about/cultural-advisors
"Age of climate change and wildfires". As-if that's what's going on here...
"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
- Oscar Wilde
> Tremble’s letter said it is unknown whether filling the reservoirs at 1 p.m. would have ultimately made a difference.
And there’s this whole whiff of “kooky liberals prioritizing silly native crops over fire prevention” in the coverage about the issue, which certainly makes me suspicious as well.
I suspect time will show that the decision was not at all clear-cut and all relevant details are not yet known.
1. https://www.staradvertiser.com/2023/08/16/hawaii-news/reques...