Hawaii has a robust emergency siren warning system. It sat silent during the deadly wildfires::Some Maui residents are questioning the effectiveness of the emergency warning system employed as the wildfires spread rapidly across Lahaina and other parts on Tuesday. Hawaii’s attorney general is leading a review of the emergency response.
Don’t quote me, but I remember someone they were interviewing on NPR say the system wasn’t activated because it was a tsunami warning system, which tells residents to go to higher ground, and in this case going to higher ground would be suicide.
Yes, this is what gets me too. If they had sounded the sirens, people are taught to take a certain action. That action (get to higher ground) would have caused a different type of confusion. So I can understand that some government employees sat there discussing it and ruled it out because the action they needed people to take, was not going to happen with the siren. I really don’t know what they would have told me people to do. Everything was moving so fast that giving coordinated evacuation instructions would have been damn near impossible. I don’t think the warning systems really would have done much, when you think through it.