The fires in Hawaii are slowly being contained, the mourning for the 93 confirmed dead remains. So also the questions: Why did the catastrophe take on such proportions? And what went wrong with the warning?
Once a month, the alarm goes off on the Hawaiian islands: Then the emergency rehearsals are made if there is an earthquake or tsunami, explains Hawaiian Congresswoman Jill Tokuda on CNN.
But why the sirens didn’t go off as the devastating fire swept across Maui at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour is one of the many questions authorities are now asking and investigating.
State alarm system sirens are distributed throughout Hawaii.
People are said to have been warned on cellphones, but many eyewitnesses say even that didn’t happen. This is also described by Claudia Garcia, who lives on Maui ARD: “They didn’t warn the population. The electricity in Lahaina was off. But if that’s the case, the alarm on the phone should still work. But nothing happened.”
Danger from falling power lines
There is also criticism of the electricity suppliers. They would have had no contingency plans to cut power as a precaution because of the extreme winds. In California, a state with regular wildfires, power is shut off in at-risk areas. In 2018, a devastating fire killed 86 people in Paradise, California. The cause of the fire was a power line that was knocked over by the strong wind. The fire was the deadliest in the past 100 years in the United States, now Maui holds this sad record.
Climate change leads to drought
In Hawaii, the danger of fires has apparently been underestimated. This emerges from a report and Congresswoman Tokuda also admits to omissions: “We underestimated the danger, the speed of fire.”
Climate researchers have been warning for a long time that global warming can also have fatal consequences in Hawaii. “Climate change is weather on steroids,” University of Honolulu climate researcher Chip Fletcher casually explains to public radio station HPR. “This is how climate change works: It slowly increases stress levels. We see that it’s getting warmer and rain is changing and decreasing.” This led to a drought, which in turn contributed to the Lahaina tragedy.
Introduced plant species encourage fire
Climate change is also changing nature: Introduced, i.e. invasive, plant species have also played their part in why the fires were able to spread so quickly.
The so-called guinea grass is one of them. This grows quickly in Hawaii, but dries up just as quickly and can then act like tinder in fires, biologist Lucas Fortini from the US Geology Department told the ARD already in February: “With increasing drought, there is a possibility that fires will become more frequent. If that happens, not only will many native plants die, but above all the invasive species will come back.”
Climate researcher Fletcher warns that large storms could also occur more frequently. This is how winds from Hurricane Dora would have fanned the fires on Maui. “We have to be extremely vigilant,” Fletcher warns. Such extreme weather events could occur more frequently in the future.