Pat Stuart

How could it happen? Over 110 people dead, an entire city destroyed, neighborhoods in surrounding areas leveled and the charred remains of once beautiful boats under water.  Stories of terror. Stories of fear. Bodies telling of people asleep when the fire reached them, of children playing in their homes, of thousands who had no warning and no opportunity to flee.

It sounds like fiction or some horrible cataclysm. Pompeii and Herculaneum come to mind with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Ash and lava came down on the towns so fast that escape was either not an option or problematic. But that was a volcano! That was an inexorable force that no man could be expected to counter or fight, that could be blamed on no man.

The Maui fire and others like it — Paradise, for example — show what man can do to man. It’s too soon to be certain, but it appears that the Maui wildfires began with high winds and sparking power lines falling into thick vegetation. Manmade fire fed by nature man failed to control, in short. Then, human error. The fires might have been contained, the damage limited if not for human error and emergency planning failures. Again, human error. Wrong calls. Insufficient manpower. Faulty equipment. Inefficiently deployed manpower.  

As for the human toll, people might have gotten out in time if they’d been warned. They weren’t. But Maui has FEMA’s sophisticated IPAWS system, the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System, which includes sirens. In fact, Maui county’s website brags that it has “the largest single integrated public safety outdoor siren warning system in the world.”

Indeed. The people who created, installed, and tested this system must be sick at heart. So much work, so much planning, such a huge expense and it wasn’t used.  

The website also advises people that, when they hear the sirens, they should go to high ground either in the hills or upper floors. It also says they should listen for other directions.

But, even with no other information and with smoke thick in the air, would any reasonable person think the danger was from a tsunami? I don’t think so. Neither do the fire’s survivors. Flames, they now say, reached 2,000 degrees F and the wind gusts were clocked at 110 miles per hour.

Errors. A lot of them.

No one sounds an alarm. No emergency response announcements are made. Too soon cellphone and telephone service collapse, radios and televisions fall silent. Authorities closed two roads leaving only one way out for too many people. One road only. One road which became not an escape route but a death trap — a hopelessly jammed parking lot stretching for miles. The rest is tragic. It’s history. It’s a lesson.

We’ve had others.  

We’ve had all-too-many examples of what happens when a fire runs wild in an urban area because of high winds, sparking power lines, and tinder-dry vegetation. Two stand out because in one, emergency management plans worked while in the other they didn’t.  

The Camp Fire that killed so many residents of Paradise is an obvious example of the latter.  They, too, had the IPAWS system but blame for the high toll of human deaths goes to a technical failure of the then new equipment.

Then we had the 2021 Marshall fire in Boulder County. Again, sparks from downed power lines probably ignited dry grasslands. Driven by winds that gusted up to 115 miles per hour, the fire bore down on towns and housing developments, covering 3 miles in just an hour.  

Emergency management there responded in multiple ways, putting out warnings, evacuating housing and commercial areas downwind, closing highways. Over 37,000 people were evacuated from offices, box stores, shops and homes. Travelers on the interstate and nearby highways were warned and diverted.  

All but two got out. The Marshall fire destroyed 1,084 structures, killed an unknown number of pets and a few farm animals, but most farm animals were saved.  

Think about that. Then, consider that we, too, get occasional bouts of very high winds. We, too, have grassfires. Such disasters can be a once-in-a-century event, but Maui reminds us of the importance of civic planning, effective emergency management, and of citizen awareness.