I believe that was a federal issue. This I think was a county issue.
I totally get the fear about the siren making people flee towards the mountains, but there are two very important factors:
-
Maui was already on alert due to wildfires in the area. Any siren would have immediately made them think of the most recent disaster on their minds, not a tsunami.
-
It was nighttime. Anyone fleeing would immediately see one side of the sky bright with fire, and the other dark and safe.
I understand not wanting to be responsible for a few people fleeing in the wrong direction due to panic, but the other option was to let a town full of people burn while asleep in their beds.
3 Likes
Exactly. The sirens going off is like “Hey wake up, something is happening. Seek out further information”, not “blindly head away from the shore, don’t ask questions.”
Even if 1 out of 10 people know what the sirens are for, they can inform the other 9 as they see them on the street headed the wrong way. The wall of fire coming down from the mountains is also another clue. An alarm is an alarm… get their attention, let them know something isn’t normal, there’s ways for them to figure it out at that point. But with no sirens… yeah… they’ll be finding lots of people in their beds and such.
Canada is burning too right now, lives getting uprooted… very sad.
3 Likes
Is it even a possibility that they could have shut down the power grid even for a few hours? Isn’t that question just as important?
The fire hydrants are supplied with water via electric pumps. No power, no water.
1 Like
Yeah, but I meant before it escalated to a wildfire. It would’ve been very difficult to predict and to have envisioned the full scale destruction, but maybe the high winds was warning enough? Once the powerlines are knocked over and transformers explode, there isn’t any power anyways?
Yeah, but then if a fire started another way, there’d be no way to fight it early on since, as I understand it, you can’t just flip a switch and have power back on immediately without risking damaging equipment.
Mostly though, they lacked any sort of coordinated plan between the state/county and the electric company to even do that which you need to deal with the consequences of shutting down power (like pumps).
Power lines being knocked over doesn’t necessarily knock out all the power. Transmission feeds are often networked and distribution lines are segmented so one break doesn’t affect everyone. There should be some fault isolation to stop power going to a downed power line, but not fast enough to prevent any initial sparks.
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
