On August 8, a wildfire ravaged the town of Lahaina, Maui. Killing up to 115 people, While 388 people are reported missing weeks after the fire. At 6:30 AM on August 8, a power line was toppled by high winds that resulted in a fire. That specific fire was quickly put out.

However, by that afternoon, another fire had sparked , and by the time the fire department got there, the fire was too big for them to put out, and the fire started spreading into the city of Lahaina, or at least that’s what Hawaiian Electric, one of the biggest suppliers of energy in the state of Hawaii claims. This comes as a Lawsuit against the electricity company was filed by Maui County.  The actual cause of the fire, that would eventually burn half of Lahaina to the ground, is still unknown, and is under thorough investigation by the ATF.

According to The New York Times, the Chief of the Maui Emergency Management Agency resigned Thursday, August 17. This decision came after questions mounted about his agency’s decision not to pull the sirens on the island, as the deadly wildfires of Maui bore down on the historic town of Lahaina. A day earlier at a press conference, The Chief of the Maui Emergency Management Agency, Herman Andaya, defended the decision not to activate the sirens, saying the outdoor alarms are used primarily for tsunamis and would not have helped because people are trained to seek higher ground when they hear the siren. According to ABC news Andaya does not regret his decision to refrain from sounding the tsunami siren. 

The fact that someone tries to justify rejecting an option that could have saved many more lives because you only trained people to see sirens as tsunami warnings—and the fact that he doesn’t regret making this decision—makes my blood boil. While I do know that tsunamis are common in the pacific ocean, especially in Hawaii since it’s in the middle of the ring of fire, the oceanic plate of the pacific ocean that is responsible for a great amount of the volcanic and earthquake activity that happens on both the pacific coast like California and East Asian nations like Japan. The idea that you would not train a population to be prepared for any disaster other than either a tsunami or hurricanes is very naive at best, and incredibly stupid at worst. If he had decided to pull that alarm, he probably would have saved many more lives than were lost.

When I hear someone say that they only use warnings for a certain type of emergency, I usually take it as them not taking any other type of disaster besides a certain one seriously, Which is what I dislike. While tsunamis and wildfires are very different in the sense that they are two very different elements, they both have something in common: They destroy people’s livelihoods and families without any remorse.

I also believe that the idea that climate change was the answer to why the fires were so deadly is simply incorrect, and I’m not the only person who believes this . According to FiveThirtyEight, climate change wasn’t responsible for the fires on their own, and many scientist say that there were multiple factors involved, such as naturally occurring weather patterns and the introduction of non native plants to the island, that have worked in tandem with climate influences to make the wildfires so much more deadly.

Though climate change along with differing factors can have an effect on communities, mismanagement at the local and possibly even state and federal level can have just as much of an impact when it comes to disasters, if not more. Hopefully Maui and the entire government of Hawaii can learn from The former Chief’s example. If we are able to learn from his mistakes, nothing like this will ever happen again.