People follow directions because they think the people giving them know what's best. Too late, they realize those people are only following directions given to them by someone else, further from the scene, with even less at stake. In a crisis, we need to be able to distinguish between the urge to act, and the urge to panic. It's very difficult. And it's more complicated than that, because sometimes those distant planners are right. But, unavoidably, you're the one responsible for your safety, not the police or the government, or an orange traffic cone, or a barricade.
I really don't understand what point you tried to make. Claiming "you're the one responsible for your safety" really does not say anything, specially as you do not have the context or situational awareness to know whether staying put or running away will save your life or get you killed.
There are plenty of wildfires where individuals "responsible for their own safety" got themselves killed by driving straight into the expected path of the fire, against the express directions of emergency services. Would you call those cases a win in the libertarian books?
It's very weird how this belief that your amateur ignorance is far superior to the informed guidance of professional emergency services can get any traction whatsoever.
I don't think there is anything weird about it. It's not hard to find anecdotes where not wearing a seatbelt may have saved someone's life, when the drivers side of the car was crushed or punctured, but the driver was thrown to a different location. It doesn't mean in general it's a good idea to not wear your seatbelt, because you can't know in advance that's the kind of crash your going to get into.
Similarly here ignoring a barricade in a wildfire is a great way to find yourself driving into the path of the fire, getting yourself killed, and there are plenty examples of people doing just that. The fact that in this case those placing the barriers got it wrong, and ignoring them may have saved lives does not make it a good idea to ignore such warnings in the general case.
When Tucson experienced a hazardous chemical spill during evening rush hour[0] officials required everyone to shelter in their homes to avoid the poisonous fumes outside. At the same time they closed tons of roads for miles around the area, even the inbound road access to many residential areas. What could people do who needed to get home to their kids? They had to park their car and trek a few miles to their homes. So much for staying inside.
I don't know my point really except to bring up another instance where local emergency response did not make sense and it is incredibly frustrating when it causes additional harm.
Even more tragic - Korean disaster mv Sewol where Captain used ship PA to tell school children to stay put, then jumped into safety raft and swam away.
These are the kinds of situations that make me glad self driving cars still don't work well enough to replace human drivers. Humans can evaluate the entire situation and decide when to break rules, while self driving cars don't understand anything and can only follow rules according to what little it can detect and process. Humans are a lot more concerned with staying alive than following rules, but rules are all self driving cars know and they don't care at all if you burn to death or not.
Survival is almost always increased by ignoring government officials, I dont know why we have to keep relearning this lesson over and over again but some people still follow government like they have some divine knowledge
Government works best which is subservient to the people, the second it becomes something else bad things will happen
No. Government generally has a much better big picture than you do and thus is more likely to get it right.
Where they typically get it wrong is avoiding a known small risk vs a possible bigger risk. However, in this case it seems to be a known small risk vs a certain much bigger risk.
I recommend the book "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott:
>Scott shows how central governments attempt to force legibility on their subjects, and fail to see complex, valuable forms of local social order and knowledge. A main theme of this book, illustrated by his historic examples, is that states operate systems of power toward 'legibility' in order to see their subjects correctly in a top-down, modernist, model that is flawed, problematic, and often ends poorly for subjects. The goal of local legibility by the state is transparency from the top down, from the top of the tower or the center/seat of the government, so the state can effectively operate upon their subjects.
Strong disagree. The government big picture sets heuristics that makes sense for a lot of people a lot of the time. Even when it's right, it does not take into account personal circumstance which is only knowable to the individual.
I am not sure how anyone can claim this with a strait face having lived through 2020-2023.... which is living memory so I do not have to do back into the recorded history to show government failure. I can just talk about my lived experience at how completely incompetent government is at managing "emergencies"
Central planning is always bad, be it for emergencies or economics or anything else
Why does there need to be an alternative, and yes central planning often does prevent both local planning and individuals " doing the best for themselves. " for example in the context of Covid response there were many FEDERAL policies put in place that preventing local authorities from overriding them, and prevented "individuals doing the best for themselves. "
Some of these were over turned by the courts after months or years of fighting, some the central planners just rescinded, but in all cases the central planning supplanted local and individual freedom
In the context of Maui, I bet there are federal policies in place on the subject of Forrest management, fire control, etc that all supplant local authority, and certainly remove individual control
Abuses and corruption is how government is done in the US. Sure. That's a problem. As much at the federal as local levels. People can't help themselves. But would the ideal really be to remove all federal action?
In the case of Covid, as much as the top policies were messed up in places, individuals around me very much paid attention and did what they could in addition or in place of that. They still run their own testing standards for example and take anything from CDC with a grain of salt (that will take a LONG time to fix - probably for the better). For one, the massive amounts of money poured into vaccines and lab tests and home tests, IMO, made a difference that would have been much harder to achieve for locals or purely commercial efforts.
There are multiple issues here that seems to stem from taking my comments in a way not intended.
For example, I am fine with the CDC Existing, I am fine with them advocating the public do x, or y, I am fine with them establishing protocols and guidance for people
I am not fine with them having the authority to order people to do X, or to exceed their authority prohibiting evictions, or working with private industry to target people for censorship that dared to question their advice or many of the other things
Again read my opening comment "Government works best which is subservient to the people" this means the government can ADVISE people on the best actions to take, but should not ORDER people to do it...
The second the government has the power to ORDER you do something well you are now a serf and not a free person.
No, the local residents and first responders have a much better big picture on local issues, which a wildfire most definitely is. The problem with wildfires is a lot of personnel and management get shipped in from elsewhere, and they often have no clue on local conditions. I have great admiration for the firefighters that work wildfires, but the management is awful. But, I'm probably bitter because the Fed burned my parents' house down due to mismanagement of a wildfire.
Also, there is knowing the limits of the governments capabilities, and accentuating it.
The Cajun Navy started out with someone's great aunt rounding up some bass boats in the swamp to send to New Orleans after Katrina. It now has dispatchers on call (which takes pressure off of the 911 system) collecting needs, channeling volunteers where rescues are needed, and piping emergencies to 911. Also, has built expertise around post-disaster rebuilding - CNGF has boots on the ground in Maui.
I know several people that have ignored fire evacuation orders and saved their homes instead. No fire department is going to tell people to fight the fire because they don't know people's individual situations.
Shelter and place orders are another funny one. I have a lot of fond memories ignoring shelter in place orders hiking and camping in the wilderness during covid. It probably reduced my risk versus Sheltering at home. Blanket orders were one size fits all, made to address the person that is going to parties and bars.
The government is never looking out for your individual interests. It only cares about the average, and you can be the person that dies as collateral damage from an order that still has a good average outcome
>The government is never looking out for your individual interests. It only cares about the average, and you can be the person that dies that's collateral damage from an order that still has a good average outcome
This only works up to a point. If everyone stays home and turns on their sprinklers and hoses, the water distribution system quickly fails, and then NOBODY can fight the fire, be it individuals or the average. This is a very simple lesson that was learned more than a century ago. Acting in a selfish manner only works if a tiny fraction of people do that. We typically name these people after a certain excreting orifice for a reason.
I'm not saying everyone should stay home. I'm explicitly acknowledging that the average policy works for the average person.
The people that I know that fought fires are Rural and not even on a distribution system. They saved their home while the firefighters passively watched their neighbors houses burned down. The firefighters orders were to make sure there were no fires by a Road intersection, and since there weren't, this meant standing around doing nothing for 24 hours within shouting distance of houses burning down. A good example of how public priorities don't always match your personal priorities.
I get that people hate non-conformists and deviance, but Not everything needs to be an us vs them zero-sum game.
>I know several people that have ignored fire evacuation orders and saved their homes instead.
Lots of wildfire stories include people who ignored evacuation orders and died. This is just silly confirmation bias. The large majority of people who survive wildfires do so because they listened to government officials and implying that people should ignore evacuation orders is frankly stupidly dangerous.
>Shelter and place orders are another funny one. I have a lot of fond memories ignoring shelter in place orders hiking and camping in the wilderness during covid. It probably reduced my risk versus Sheltering at home. Blanket orders were one size fits all, made to address the person that is going to parties and bars.
How would going out lower your risk in this case? You obviously increased your risk, if only so slightly.
Edit* I literally just got notice of a level 3 evac that doesn't cover me but is near me. I'm sure all those "non-conformists" will stay and make life miserable for firefighters.
To quote PHPisthebest "I think you have confused ignoring the government orders with "doing the opposite".
Are you claiming that government orders are optimal 100% of the time in 100% of situations? If not, then sometimes it is wrong, and it might be wrong for you.
>How would going out lower your risk in this case? You obviously increased your risk, if only so slightly.
Being alone miles from anyone else has zero covid risk. Covid risk doesn't kick in when you leave the door of your house. In my case, I also had roommates who worked, like me and interacted with other people.
>Are you claiming that government orders are optimal 100% of the time in 100% of situations? If not, then sometimes it is wrong, and it might be wrong for you.
Of course not. Your example was just not a situation where not following orders was individually optimal. You and your friends are suffering from confirmation bias. They did something incredibly stupid and dangerous and put their lives at risk and more importantly, increased risk for the firefighters working the job. It happened to work out but that doesn't mean it was wise. They could have just as easily died or killed a firefighter who was trying to rescue them.
Why don't you reach out to a wildland firefighters outfit and see their perspective on what bullshit they have to deal with when dumbasses don't evacuate.
For the vast majority of people, the vast majority of the time, following emergency instructions is the optimal outcome. Even in this case, the folks who went around the barrier didn't know that going around was safer than going back. They gambled and it worked out.
>Being alone miles from anyone else has zero covid risk. Covid risk doesn't kick in when you leave the door of your house. In my case, I also had roommates who worked, like me and interacted with other people.
Ah yes, I'm sure you magically went from your bedroom to wilderness miles away from anyone else without stopping or interacting with anyone!
Look, I'm not saying going out in the wilderness was wrong, its just silly to think it lowered your risk at all.
I think that you are approaching this is making the mistake of treating each instance as identical when they are not. Different situations have different risks and you can't claim that a choice was wrong or stupid without understanding the specific situation. This is the difference between the usefulness of a heuristic in general, and the usefulness of a heuristic in a specific situation.
You can't claim that they put their lives at risk and made a stupid mistake without that information.
The same holds true for the covid example. You don't know the specifics and are making a generalization. It is in fact possible to go camping without interacting with people.
Why you believe outsourcing your thinking is the best course of action? Why has government done to earn such blind loyalty from you? As someone who has pretty in depth knowledge of history I can not fathom the level of trust you have placed in government. it is almost theological ...
> Shelter and place orders are another funny one. I have a lot of fond memories ignoring shelter in place orders hiking and camping in the wilderness during covid.
I was thinking more about sheltering from tornados and hurricanes.
I see. the same holds true. If you have prior knowledge that your house is structurally unsound and your neighbor has a bomb proof house, you should probably use common sense and stay with your neighbors instead.
Im not saying never follow orders, just that by definition universal orders aren't best for everyone in every situation. Common sense goes a long way towards contextualizing them and their usefulness.
I think you have confused ignoring the government orders with "doing the opposite of what the government says"
For example at different times I have went to my basement during while the tornado sirens where going off, and other times I have stood outside looking at the clouds...
Why because I took the governments recommendation, added my own information from various weather sources, radar, and decades of experience and formulated my personal risk at that moment
Sometimes, it can be a case where someone is still alive, but hasn't yet communicated with the person that reported them missing for whatever reason. After two weeks, however, I imagine that most of the missing will never reappear.
Yeah, if I'm trying to escape something like a fire and see a barricade I'm going to think the officials that placed it know that taking that route would be jumping from the frying pan to the fire. Obviously they were very wrong in this case--blocking a "bad" option when the alternatives were much worse.
we dont live in a world where public servant are sage old men who are wise and knowledgeable, who have decades of experience in their domain and spend the majority of their time and effort working for the people. we live in a world where government employees are most likely a business or humanity major, are only knowledgeable or dedicated to their domain in a superficial way, and these people have dumb brains that arent detail oriented or creative. the only thing they do well is understand how to make sure they are never culpable for anything that might go wrong and ultimately protect their career above all else. these people are scum. if you are a middle aged, stem educated man then you would be wrong not to do a reality check when some government idiot puts barriers between you and your escape route. the bar is not high, think for yourself. even the scientists employed by the government have a nasty habit of being dishonest.
It’s my thought with the Uvalde situation. Ultimately, those cops didn’t want to die a heroes death; even with some kids being harmed as they watched. I couldn’t imagine obeying the order to stand down while being equipped with a firearm.
Oh god, I was just reminded of a story that came out of the Station Nightclub fire, claiming a bouncer blocked people from using an exit that was "for the band only".
> Hawaiian Electric had no procedure in place for turning off the grid
I find this hard to believe. Substations have remote control. Even if they are so old that they do not, send out a lineman crew and open the cutouts. You have to be able to do this to do maintenance and repair, it's not believable that they cannot "turn off" power in an emergency.
What they probably meant is "nobody gave any consideration to the implications of a red flag warning on the propensity for utility poles to fall and cause catestrophic fires."
I think they didn't envision turning off the grid, especially if fire risk is high. My understanding is that without power, water pumps used to provide the water needed to fight fires have to rely on generators which have limited run time.
For the experts on electronics here. Lets imagine a theoretical scenery when some undisclosed vulnerability would allow somebody to hack the system, create a voltage spike and emit sparks remotely, triggering multiple fires at a desired place, from the other coin of the planet.
Do you think that this could be a realistic danger? (or not because there are systems put in place that avoid it?)
If yes, how we could suspect foul game and hunt that person, or how the electric companies could defend its property against that possibility [1]?
[1] (I understand that the companies should have removed any flammable materials under the lines first to avoid negligence)
One thing that hasn't been much discussed but is very important regarding the Hawaii fires is that 'local government' works very differently in HI than in most states: There are no official city boundaries or city governments, only county governments. In the case of Maui, the local government (mostly in Kahului) administers three populated islands: Maui, Molokai, and Lanai. I won't claim to understand how this impacted their response to the fires; however, at the very least it should be understood that the residents typically lack the layer of 'local government' that most other Americans living in towns or cities have.
I'm curious if this will be investigated as a possible crime. Consider an open fairground area. A fire has broken out. The company who owns the fairgrounds announces for people to stay put or turn around, do not go around the barricades. People obey and die.
An argument could me made that the company is negligible, and possibly criminally liable for manslaughter, although that would be a stretch.
and those korean kids on that ship, the only ones who survived were the ones who disobeyed orders. and theres video of the kids staying in place talking about a subway accident where people were told to stay put and the only ones who died were the ones who disobeyed. think for yourself.
Everyone's focused on the barricades (orange cones from the sound of it) but this caught my eye at the end:
> “The gridlock would have left us there when the firestorm came,” Cuevas-Reyes, 38, told the AP. “I would have had to tell my children to jump into the ocean as well and be boiled alive by the flames or we would have just died from smoke inhalation and roasted in the car.”
That kind of gridlock is why we have all of those giant stroads everyone loves to complain about every few blocks in California. A few years ago my house was one mile from a wildfire in SoCal and the two lane road was overwhelmed during the evacuation despite only supporting a small exurban population. Now at my new suburban house, the neighboring development recently got halted after only building out 20% of the units because the fire marshal calculated that our surrounding roads wouldn't be able to support the traffic in case of evacuation. The developer is trying to get a new freeway on-ramp approved atm, otherwise they'll have to switch from dense 5-over-1s to single family homes in the rest of the development.
This is a reminder for everyone to download and print out the evacuation routes and tape them to the inside of your door! When done correctly, they're carefully designed to allow as many people to get out as fast as possible without causing gridlock while still allowing emergency vehicles in.
Unfortunately this is all carried out at the state and local level so it takes a tragedy like Lahaina for people to really start investing in proper (sub)urban and emergency planning.
All it takes is one fallen power line or tree to turn that stroad into a giant parking lot of death. Cutting back brush and undergrounding power lines is much more cost-effective than building stroads up into the hillsides.
The AP article cited notes that the "barricades" were in many cases downed live power and telephone lines:
"The utility says more than 30 power poles are down in West Maui, including along the Honoapiilani Highway at the south end of Lahaina." (That Highway aka Highway 30) was the main southern route out of town.)
"A telephone pole falls behind their car, causing an accident and blocking a side street."
Cutting back brush and putting powerlines underground doesn't help people evacuate during a natural disaster, it just removes two ways a single type of natural disaster can spread.
Everyone living in an area needs enough space to evacuate fast enough to get away from natural disasters safely. It doesn't matter if there's a downed power line when no one can get out due to gridlock even in the best case scenario. Everyone's gotta be able to get out fast enough.
I was in Laihaina in mid-July. I've been all over the world and that was easily one of the most beautiful places I've experienced. Locals were incredibly friendly (bought a hat at Maui Hat). No hint of snobbery or localism. Very sad. The tour-guide that took us out to a tourist submaraine died in this fire. I saw countless kids with their parents on the beaches (we went to baby beach). I'm just a dumb tourist but I experienced profane sadness over some of the people I'd met that I know got totally wiped out, died or are ruined. Nobody had any time to react because most people were sheltering form the storm winds. The locals should have sounded the sirens to get people out of their houses.
That trail is awesome! I can't believe they took wagons up that trail back in the 1800s...If you ever get back their there's a service road that leads up to the top of the mountains and takes you to some lakes. You can see it from the road. Would recommend that hike too.
> The workers were motioning for everyone to turn back toward Lahaina.
They literally sent people to die, under the color of authority as working under county government.
Will anybody face accountability?
edit: I'm rate-limited but to provide an a historical analog:
In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire killed over a hundred young women working in the garment industry. The building's doors were locked by the owners of the factory to reduce theft.
The owners were found liable for the deaths of their employees, but the damages were a pittance.
I have trouble seeing "deliberately blocking the means of egress with reckless disregard for its need in an emergency evacuation for the sake of your own convenience" as profoundly different here.
At which point you see them "disregarding common sense and basic humanity" ? I just see people completely overwhelmed by the situation that don't manage to find the good choice.
This is not an unforeseeable occurrence. Hawaii is a tiny island state that is often hit by hurricanes, tsunami, and volcanic freaking eruptions. Any organization that is empowered to close roads needs to have good policies to decide what to do in emergency evacuations so they don't accidentally social-murder anyone.
Somebody decided that preparing for this fully-predictable event wasn't a priority.
> Any organization that is empowered to close roads needs to have good policies to decide what to do in emergency evacuations so they don't accidentally social-murder anyone
So every time the utility needs to do line maintenance, it has to draw up contingency plans for a nuclear strike?
The problem wasn't overzealous road closures. It was a general lack of a fire plan.
It literally killed people, so determining if there's been no criminal negligence should happen in front of a court.
That's what accountability means. If the person in charge did nothing wrong, then the court will tell that. But you can't say “everything went fine, nothing to see here” when people died.
Have you any indication that Shirtwaist is remotely comparable? It seems that here those who closed the road believed this was to promote safety. There’s no indication that Shirtwaist doors were blocked to promote safety.
Tragic events like this can be a reminder that the only person responsible for your safety is You. You Cannot rely on "officials" or rules to care more about you than you do. Trust your gut, maintain awareness. Do not be lulled into complacency by safety theatre.
This advice is pretty bad, and reeks of survivorship bias. This "truthiness" approach to safety purposely ignores the countless cases of morons getting themselves killed by intentionally ignoring directions from emergency services.
A tornado wiped out my town when I was nine. the local authorities never activated the tornado sirens. Killed something like 18 people in a clustered area. the people that died trusted the government to warn them whereas the people who survived took it upon themselves to maintain awareness of their surroundings. Do not put your kids lives in danger because you're offloading that responsibility to bureaucrats. In the case of Maui the Disaster Emergency lead was a crony that got the job for political reasons. He didn't know what he was doing, and just like with my local city, he failed to alert those in the city of the impending doom. Moral of the story is nobody cares about you and your family more than yourself.
Also worth remembering that frequently the average person has no idea what to do in emergencies and the gut response is frequently wrong, if not terribly wrong.
Good training makes a huge difference. Ditto experience.
Hard to quickly judge: How much applicable good training/experience does the law officer who is giving you directions (in an emergency) have? And ditto for the command structure behind him, which is most likely where the "direct people to go $This way, not $That way" decisions are coming from.
Let's assume you are right, and just presume that a police officer is as useless in an emergency response scenario as your average Joe.
Police officers are a part of a regional- and state-wide organization dedicated to respond to emergencies, collect and process information from multiple sources including direct presence in critical areas, and coordinate the efforts of all members. All members, including your hypothetical police officer.
Do you really think that your personal ignorance and lack of insight and context and situational awareness is no better than that of the police officer who is integrated in that state-wide organization dedicated to act during these events?
Industrial levels of arrogance and presumption are required to think the average Joe knows best on how to act during an emergency than emergency responders on the ground.
Doctors make mistakes too, they're average people too. Should we go with our gut on medical decisions?
At what point does someone stop becoming "average people" for us to think that our gut doesn't outsmart them?
Lets not forget that "average people" are commonly barely better than animals in emergency situations. Look at how much training it takes to ensure a building full of people don't trample each other to death in the event of a building emergency.
There's a very wide gulf between being ultimately responsible for your own safety and assuming that your immediate, uneducated gut reactions are more informed than professionals with training.
It also leads to disorganization. Imagine everyone cutting around each other and end up blocking the road. Instead of keeping order everyone slowly exiting, a few cutting ahead could cost many others dearly.
That's certainly a challenge to navigate, but not an excuse to completely throw your intelligence away. If a road sign clearly pointing off a cliff, don't drive off the cliff!
If your town is on fire in a sign, possibly outdated, points You Into The Inferno, don't follow it!
If there is a safe spot that you have personal knowledge of, go there despite the directions.
There were downed power lines in the roads, blocking traffic. Many of these power lines were in the outbound lanes.
The AP article cited for the claim that there were barricades shows officers directing evacuees around a downed power line while utility workers try to remove it from the road.
I don't see a quote from anyone who saw people turn around and die as a result. I see a quote from someone talking about how it would have been bad to make a wrong turn. And another about people stuck in traffic. But those are not the same as what the headline claims.
And those are the 2 salient points in an article thick with emotion and implications.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But they present no evidence to support their claims...
I find it weird that the title of the article focuses on them so much, but it seems like the barricades there were due to the downed electrical wire or to keep people away from other areas that were on fire. Timed differently driving around the barricade one could have ended up in a worse situation than they already were.
Hindsight is of little value to those who were making decisions in the moment, but really, "make your own rules during an emergency" seems like it isn't guaranteed to be effective. You're just as likely to be adding to the problem as anything.
Remember - you don't have much information at that moment.
You could have driven right into a fire or into a tangle of live power lines. You could have endangered the lives of the road crew working on the power lines, or could have caused an incident that prevented the road from being opened at all, preventing anyone from escaping that way - you don't know when or if it was going to be reopened. So possibly worse? Absolutely. And keep in mind that the "burning alive in your car" wasn't a guaranteed outcome here - many people survived.
I think this is a tragedy of the commons type case.
In general and for the society at large, what you want is order. Listen to authorities, do what they say. If everyone is in full panic mode, its very likely even more people die. By following directions and maintaining order, you increase the odds that more people survive.
For you personally? Go in full panic mode, do whatever you have to, to live. At the end of the day, no one is getting a ticket for running a police barricade. But some people that listened are literally dead.
Basically - I want everyone else to be calm and follow directions, and I want to push my way to the front and save myself.
This reminds me of a great book: Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why.
The author looks at case studies (and some stats iirc) of a bunch of people in life-threatening situations, some who survived and others not. He looks at how they acted, gets into the psychology of why people act that way, and pulls out some lessons.
One of them was "think for yourself, don't just follow instructions." One example was 9/11, during which some people in the towers were told to just stay where they were. Some of those who ignored that instruction made it out.
I imagine on most emergencies that fails spectacularly.
There has to be some rule for spotting the inefficacy of the responders. But it's quite hard to make something that works. Even "know about the emergency and how things work around it" tends to fail often. Also, the next "obvious" one of "past performance is damn highly correlated with future performance" is so full of problems that it's completely counterproductive.
Reaction I - any reason why "we" (HN) are looking at The Hill for coverage on this topic? The Hill basically is a Washington(DC)-centric political news site. Not public safety, nor municipal government, nor wildfire, nor ...
Reaction II - when a fast-moving "plus 4 sigma" disaster hits, what's the usual batting average for any local municipal government handling it correctly? I'm betting "d*mned low". This is real-world America - not a "competence porn" movie from Hollywood, nor a "they were morally responsible..." term paper in Philosophy 271.
Reality Check - coverage of Maui's last municipal election is here:
https://www.civilbeat.org/2022/11/maui-county-richard-bissen... Notice that "protecting from climate change" gets all of one in-passing mention in the long article. And nothing closer to the actual disaster is even mentioned. Concept: if an "all the experts are warning us" potential $Disaster is of minimal interest to local voters...then it's hardly surprising if the local government which they elect is neither physically nor mentally capable of coping with $Disaster.
"Sensibility to climate change" has nothing to do with competence in "plus 4 sigma" disaster response. For that matter usually neither does the latest election.
Disaster preparedness or response is about readiness and means (purchased ahead of time) to do pretty ad-hoc things on very short notice. The slow, long trend isn't the issue. For that matter, once the fire was a large and fast wildfire there quite possibly wasn't much that the entire island could have magically instantly moved to Lahaina to make much difference. The "authorization to release water" is a more interesting one: it was earlier and it was means on hand and it was a few persons' opportunity to be informed and ready to "just do it". And again nothing to do with climate change but instead everything to do with a "now and right here" problem.
With the level of incompetence being shown by officials, I think it's not too far fetched to consider jail time for them. They'll plead ignorance of course, but there were warnings and these deaths are on them.
This water dispute has been going on for a while. From that article: "In 2022, two Maui senators, Gil Keith-Agaran and Lynne DeCoite, introduced a measure to push DLNR to allow fresh water to be used to fight fires and pointed to West Maui as being particularly vulnerable." The measure didn't go anywhere.
So what warnings should’ve been heeded differently? Is it the “we’re running out of water” warning that’s been going on for years or just the “we actually need to use a bunch of water to put out fires” warning?
Obviously we should use water to save lives and there were errors there, but I’m 100% confident that the question of whether we can use water to fight fires didn’t come up for no reason.
You seem to have a problem comprehending what I said. I said "with the level of incompetence being shown by officials". It has nothing about following procedure. It's the ignoring of warning signs and the willful disregard to prepare for windstorms like this. So yes, I want to jail top-level officials who could have done more to prevent this (government as well as those in charge of Maui Electric). Not the low-level workerbee who just setup a barricade.
It is easy to blame people but it changes nothing, of course they committed errors but it is unlikely they did it aiming to kill their people. Media and Humans have this strange desire to see blood instead to find errors on the process and procedures and then change it to avoid future errors.
For example, media blame they to not turn on the sirens but sirens are for tsunamis and weren’t placed on mountains and the procedure for sirens is go to mountains (the opposite of what should be done).
At least don't let a good crisis go to waste, right. We might never make it out of covid but we should try to get lockdowns going again in other ways. Something like this is a perfect example. Lock down and stay safe. Shelter in place. Save the planet.
> No, this doesn't apply to every other situation involving officials and emergencies and the public.
Who said that? Me? Stop virtue signaling and politicizing disasters, that's how people die. Drawing a line in the sand only urges people to take sides and make dangerous and extreme choices.
When bad shit happens, keep calm, use some common sense and think ahead, work as a community, that's all.
