A Maui official defended not activating sirens during closing week’s deadly wildfires, because the county’s emergency reaction has come beneath scrutiny over what extra can have been achieved to most likely save lives.
Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator Herman Andaya mentioned the protocol is to make use of the coastal sirens simplest during tsunami warnings, and not during wildfires.
Andaya advised journalists that the sirens sign to other people to hunt upper flooring, and there have been fears that sounding the sign can have led evacuees immediately into the flames.
He additionally mentioned sirens would not be loudly heard with the winds howling and other people inside of with their air conditioners on, and that there are not any sirens at the mountainside, the place the hearth was once additionally spreading, to alert other people.
A member of the blended Joint Task Force 50 seek, rescue and restoration part conducts a seek operations in a space broken via wildfires in Lahaina, Maui, Aug. 15, 2023.
Staff Sergeant Matthew A. Foster/AFP by means of Getty Images
When requested via a reporter during Wednesday’s briefing if he regretted not sounding the sirens, Andaya mentioned, “I do not.”
“Counties in the state of Hawaii will tell you that sirens have not been used for brush fires,” Andaya mentioned. “It is our practice to use the most effective means of conveying an emergency message to the public.”
The county’s protocol is to make use of the WPA, the Wireless Emergency Alert System, to ship indicators by means of textual content message, and the EAS, the Emergency Alert System, to ship messages to tv and radio, Andaya mentioned.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green additionally defended the selection not to make use of the sirens, pronouncing had they long past off, “I would have been expecting a tsunami to come.”
“That’s what our mentality was,” he advised journalists during the briefing.
As the wildfires unfold on Aug. 8, some survivors who fled the flames reported not having any mobile provider or energy and did not obtain any indicators.
Burned palm bushes and destroyed automobiles and structures within the aftermath of a wildfire in Lahaina, western Maui, Hawaii, Aug. 11, 2023.
Moses Slovatizki/AFP by means of Getty Images
As of Wednesday night, 111 other people had been showed lifeless within the wildfires in Maui County, with 38% of the have an effect on zone searched, officers mentioned. Even extra other people stay lacking.
Green mentioned they plan to make adjustments going ahead and can “find best practices.”
“What we’d like to do is we’d like to remove many of the barriers that we have to safety. We’d like to get powerlines underground. We intend to invest very heavily on that in recovery,” he mentioned. “We’d like to have more satellite capacity all across the state because with temperatures over 1,000 degrees, moving 60 miles an hour, it took out a lot of our infrastructure, and that made it very difficult.”
ABC News’ Marilyn Heck and Flor Tolentino contributed to this file.
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