In deadly Maui wildfires, communication failed. Chaos overtook Lahaina along with the flames

Power and cellular outages for residents further stymied communication efforts. Radio reports were scarce, some survivors reported, even as the blaze began to consume the town. Road blocks then forced fleeing drivers onto one narrow downtown street, creating a bottleneck that was quickly surrounded by flames on all sides. At least 67 people have been confirmed dead so far.

The silent sirens have raised questions about whether everything was done to alert the public in a state that possesses an elaborate emergency warning system for a variety of dangers including wars, volcanoes, hurricanes and wildfires.

Hector Bermudez left his apartment at Lahaina Shores shortly after 4:30 p.m. Tuesday after the smell of smoke woke him up from a nap. He asked his neighbor if he was also leaving.

“He said, ‘No, I am waiting for the authorities to see what they are going to do,’” Bermudez recounted. “And I said, ‘No, no no, please go. This smoke is going to kill us. You have to go. Please. You gotta get out of here. Don’t wait for nobody.’”

Bermudez doesn’t know if he survived. Officials with Maui’s Emergency Management Agency did not immediately respond Friday to questions about sirens and other communications issues.

Hawaii’s Attorney General Anne Lopez said her office will be conducting a comprehensive review of decision-making and standing policies surrounding the wildfires.

“My Department is committed to understanding the decisions that were made before and during the wildfires and to sharing with the public the results of this review,” she said in a statement Friday, adding that “now is the time to begin this process of understanding.”

The Associated Press created a timeline of the wildfires, using information from multiple sources including the county’s announcements, state and local Emergency Management Alerts and interviews with officials and survivors.

The timeline shows public updates on the fires were spotty and often vague, and much of the county’s attention was focused on another dangerous, larger fire in Upcountry Maui that was threatening neighborhoods in Kula.

It shows no indication that county officials ever activated the region’s all-hazard siren system, and reveals other emergency alerts were scarce.

In the hours before the wildfires began, however, warnings about high winds were frequent and widely disseminated by the county and other agencies. A hurricane passing far to the south was expected to bring gusts of up to 65 mph (105 kph), residents were told on Monday. The Upcountry fire started first, reported not long after midnight on Tuesday, and the first evacuations near Kula followed.

The fire near Lahaina started later, around 6:37 a.m. Tuesday. Some homes in Lahaina’s most inland neighborhood were evacuated, but by 9:55 a.m. the county reported that the fire was fully contained. Still, the announcement included another warning that high winds would remain a concern for the next 24 hours. The power also went out early that morning, leaving several thousand customers in the Lahaina/West Maui region and Upcountry without electricity. Several downed power lines required repair.

By 11 a.m., firefighting crews from several towns and the Hawaii Department of Lands had converged on the Upcountry fire, but wind gusts reaching 80 mph (129 kph) made conditions unsafe for helicopters. At 3:20 p.m., more Upcountry neighborhoods were evacuated. The Lahaina fire, meanwhile, had escaped containment and forced the closure of the Lahaina Bypass road by 3:30 p.m. The announcement, however, didn’t make it into a county fire update until 4:45 p.m. and didn’t show up on the county Facebook page until nearly 5 p.m., when survivors say flames were surrounding the cars of families trapped downtown.

But while the Lahaina fire was spreading, Maui County and Hawaii Emergency Management Agency officials were making other urgent announcements — including a Facebook post about additional evacuations near the Upcountry fire and an announcement that the acting governor had issued an emergency proclamation.

In the Upcountry evacuation Facebook post at 3:20 p.m., Fire Assistant Chief Jeff Giesea shared an ominous warning.

“The fire can be a mile or more from your house, but in a minute or two, it can be at your house,” Giesea said.

Mike Cicchino lived below the Lahaina Bypass in one of Lahaina’s more inland neighborhoods. He went to his house at 3:30 p.m. and minutes later realized his neighborhood was quickly being enveloped by flames.

He yelled to the neighbor kids to get their mom and leave. He ran inside to collect his wife and the dogs they were watching. Cicchino, along with others in the neighborhood, then jumped in their cars to leave. He listened for announcements on his car radio, but said there was essentially no information.

The government’s social media attention turned from Upcountry back to Lahaina at 4:29 p.m., when Hawaii EMA posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the local Maui EMA had announced an immediate evacuation for an inland subdivision in Lahaina. Residents were directed to shelter at the Lahaina Civic Center on the north side of town.

Just before 5 p.m., Maui County shared a new Lahaina fire report on Facebook: “Flareup forces Lahaina Bypass road closure; shelter in place encouraged.”

Many were already running from the flames. Lynn Robison evacuated from her apartment near the waterfront’s Front Street at 4:33 p.m. “There was no warning. There was absolutely none. Nobody came around. We didn’t see a fire truck or anybody,” Robison said.

Lana Vierra left her neighborhood about a mile (less than 2 kilometers) away around the same time. Her boyfriend had stopped by and told her he’d seen the approaching fire on the drive.

“He told me straight, ‘People are going to die in this town; you gotta get out,’” she recalled. There had been no sirens, no alerts on her cellphone, she said.

But access to the main highway — the only road leading in and out of Lahaina — was cut off by barricades set up by authorities. The roadblocks forced people directly into harm’s way, funneling cars onto Front Street.

“All the locals were pigeonholed into Lahaina in that corner there, and I felt like the county put us into a death trap,” Cicchino said. Nathan Baird and his family escaped by driving past a barricade, he told Canadian Broadcaster CBC Radio.

“Traffic was all over the place. Nobody knew where to go. They were trying to make everybody go up to the Civic Center and … it just didn’t make sense to me,” Baird said. “I was so confused. At first, I was like, ‘Why are all these people driving towards the fire?’”

Cicchino and his wife became trapped by walls of flame as Front Street burned. They ran for the ocean, spending hours crouching behind the sea wall or treading water in the choppy waves, depending on which area felt safest as the ever-changing fire raged.

At 5:20 p.m., Maui County shared another Lahaina fire update on Facebook: Evacuations in one subdivision were continuing, but access to the main highway was back open.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s first notification about the fires was when the search and rescue command center in Honolulu received reports of people in the water near Lahaina at 5:45 p.m., said Capt. Aja Kirksy, commander of Coast Guard Sector Honolulu.

The boats were hard to see because of the smoke, but Cicchino and others used cellphones to flash lights at the vessels, guiding them in. Cicchino helped load children into the Coast Guard boats, and at one point loaned his cellphone — which had been stashed in his wife’s waterproof pouch — to a member of the guard so they could contact fire crews. He said the rescue took hours, and he and his wife were finally brought out of Lahaina around 1 a.m. Wednesday.

Maui County Facebook posts around 8:40 p.m. Tuesday urged residents in the surrounding area who weren’t impacted by the fires to shelter in place, and said smoke was forcing more road closures. A commenter pointed out the communication problems just before 9 p.m. “You do realize that all communication to Lahaina is cut off and nobody can get in touch with anyone on that side,” the commenter wrote.

Riley Curran, who fled his Lahaina home after climbing up a neighboring apartment building to get a better look at the fire, doesn’t think there is anything the county could have done. “It’s not that people didn’t try to do anything. It’s that it was so fast no one had time to do anything,“ Curran said. “The fire went from 0 to 100.”

But Cicchino said it all felt like the county wasn’t prepared and government agencies weren’t communicating with each other.

“I feel like the county really cost a lot of peoples’ lives and homes that day. I felt like a lot of this could have been prevented if they just thought about this stuff in the morning, and took their precaution,” he said. “You live in a fire zone. They have a lot of fires. You need to prepare for fires.” The all-hazard sirens are tested each month to ensure they are in working order. During the most recent test, Aug. 1, they malfunctioned in three separate incidents in three counties. Maui’s siren tone was too short, so officials repeated the test later that day, successfully. Karl Kim directs the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, a University of Hawaii-based organization that develops training materials to help officials respond to natural disasters. Kim said it’s too soon to know exactly how the warning and alert system might have saved more lives in Lahaina, and noted that wildfires are often more challenging to manage than volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and even earthquakes because they are more difficult to detect and track over time. “I think it’s a wake-up call,” he said. “We have to invest more in understanding of wildfires and the threats that they provide, which aren’t as well understood.”

Boone reported from Boise, Idaho, and Kelleher from Honolulu. Associated Press journalists Andrew Selsky in Salem, Oregon; Matt Sedensky in New York City; Haven Daley in Wailuku, Hawaii; Helen Wieffering in Washington; and Christopher Keller in Albuquerque, New Mexico contributed. ___ Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

There had been no sirens, no alerts on her cellphone, she said.

Been reported already on local news how the polices blocked exit routes.

Not malice, just stupid local cops.

You have to go north or south, there is no “going inland” other than on foot. Either into the ocean or hoof it inland (mauka)

The real criminal failure was not activating the tsunami sirens. Everyone knows what they are and respond to them.

Whoever failed to hit the sirens on needs major prosecution for manslaughter.

I’m sure people will speculate why this, why not that and so on. Lots of finger pointing.

My feeling is, after reading many news reports, this fire went so fast that all the proper procedures and responses in the world would not have prevented a catastrophe of some magnitude. This had all the hallmarks of a flash over, but in the open and not inside of a building.

The one thing I do want to know is how the fire started.

The real criminal failure was not activating the tsunami sirens.

My recall of this part of Maui is a tsunami response would mean get to high ground. That, in this case, would be running into the fire as it came from the east and hills, moving down to the plain where Front Street sat.

There are 2 outs. Go north past Kanapali and you hit one-lane dirt roads that lead around the island to the east side. The north option is not much of an option.

Or drive a bit south of Lahina and meet the cross island highway.

The point of the sirens is to wake people up to an emergency. you know, hurricanes and fires?

Going north is not an issue, the road is paved all the way to Kahalui, but that does not matter. Just moving less than a mile north would get you out of the path of the fire. Same-same to the south.

Moving people those directions should have been what the polices were doing.

If the polices blocked those routes off, someone needs to go to prison.

This hurricane was being tracked for days, as all tropical storms are, so it’s not like they didn’t know there would be high winds and when they would arrive.

It is certainly no surprise that high winds accelerate wild fires either. Where was the advance preparation and readiness?

Oh, so they were in working order. That makes not using the sirens even more strange. Somebody made a very poor decision.

I hope you’re in a safe area if you live over there.
I spent a short while in Honolulu during the Navy.
Beautiful. Expensive as heck for single man looking for restaurant dining, but naturally quite nice.

> There are 2 outs. Go north past Kanapali and you hit one-lane dirt roads that lead around the island to the east side. The north option is not much of an option.

The north road (30) to Kaanapali becomes 340 and continues to the center of the island. When I drove it in ~2016, it may have been one lane in a couple of places, but it was all paved. IMHO just getting to Kaanapali would have ensured safety.

I’ve been in a similar situation in another state in the past. What happened then was that law enforcement conducted roadblocks galore, without any coordination or communication between the roadblocks. Traffic piled up at each roadblock, adding long delays. Roadblock personnel had no information on where to go, just that the road they were blocking was blocked. My impression was that law enforcement did not know anything, was not prepared, and ultimately just took blind stabs at seeming to be in control when they were in fact just adding to the confusion. Perhaps something similar happened in Lahaina.

I was thinking that too. A siren would mean head toward the mountains, due to waves from the ocean.

But I siren in this case would be better than nothing—people would hear the siren, come out of their homes, realize after seeing the fire that it wasn’t a wasn’t a directive to head to the hills, but the opposite.

Are residents instructed on what to do if the sirens go off and it’s not a hurricane or tsunami? How do they know where the fire is and what its velocity (speed and direction) is, if smoke obscures the fire(s) itself?

It appears authorities depended a lot on Facebook posts, but those were confused and often too late, not to mention that in a panic situation stopping to figure out where you set your phone down might get you killed. And, not everyone has Facebook. (I detest it, actually.)

Were all local radio and TV stations in the loop? Here in the mid-South USA, if NWS gets the slightest hint storm rotation might cause a tornado, the TV stations go to storm coverage and stay on it continuously until all tornado warnings have expired or been cancelled. Multiple ways exist to follow storm tracking (our TV stations are particularly good about this - one reason I really miss a local station that could be picked up at the low end of the FM dial. Back in 2006 I successfully dodged a night-time tornado while in my car — the TV station tornado location reports were the info I needed to decide to turn around and flee in the opposite direction!)

Don’t get me wrong here, I am in fact going to suggest to our local TV stations that if it’s not already in place, in event of really dangerous fires they need to go to coverage akin to their tornado warning coverage, review how they would track a fire, etc.

Does Verizon provide the First Responders Network Comms in HI ? I see commercials daily about how they provide them a separate service network than the public in NC and as I understand the entire Country.

Anyone have any details ?

Well, this is probably a realistic preview of how the government under the Democrats is going to function in a truly severe national emergency. The worst people you would want to be in charge are going to make the worst decisions possible to guarantee that the most people possible are going to be killed or injured.

"Criminal negligence at this point for not alerting the town.
Being Hawaii, no one will be punished, it is the Hawaii way with incompetence.
Union, or family will protect."

See my post #17. But in light of your post I will add some more. In business, type A people hire type A people. Type B people hire type C people. Democrat states are run by type B and type C people. In horrifying emergencies where good decisions need to be made qickly, death stands beside these people with a gleeful grin.

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