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Comment by stuff4ben | Hacker News Reader

With the level of incompetence being shown by officials, I think it's not too far fetched to consider jail time for them. They'll plead ignorance of course, but there were warnings and these deaths are on them.

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What were the warnings they should've heeded differently?

A state official delayed releasing water for firefighting efforts over a water usage dispute:

https://www.civilbeat.org/2023/08/a-state-official-refused-t...

This water dispute has been going on for a while. From that article: "In 2022, two Maui senators, Gil Keith-Agaran and Lynne DeCoite, introduced a measure to push DLNR to allow fresh water to be used to fight fires and pointed to West Maui as being particularly vulnerable." The measure didn't go anywhere.

ethanbond is so silent…

So what warnings should’ve been heeded differently? Is it the “we’re running out of water” warning that’s been going on for years or just the “we actually need to use a bunch of water to put out fires” warning?

Obviously we should use water to save lives and there were errors there, but I’m 100% confident that the question of whether we can use water to fight fires didn’t come up for no reason.

So, you're going to jail people for following procedures, because the outcome was bad?

Are you also going to jail people for not following procedures, if the outcome turned out to be bad?

You seem to have a problem comprehending what I said. I said "with the level of incompetence being shown by officials". It has nothing about following procedure. It's the ignoring of warning signs and the willful disregard to prepare for windstorms like this. So yes, I want to jail top-level officials who could have done more to prevent this (government as well as those in charge of Maui Electric). Not the low-level workerbee who just setup a barricade.

It is easy to blame people but it changes nothing, of course they committed errors but it is unlikely they did it aiming to kill their people. Media and Humans have this strange desire to see blood instead to find errors on the process and procedures and then change it to avoid future errors. For example, media blame they to not turn on the sirens but sirens are for tsunamis and weren’t placed on mountains and the procedure for sirens is go to mountains (the opposite of what should be done).

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