“There was no warning,” La Phena Davis, who managed to escape the deadly Maui wildfires this week but lost her home as they blazed through the island, told KNX Radio.
Maui is the largest of the 137 Hawaiian Islands. It is home to approximately 164,754 residents, as well as tourist destinations and resorts. Reports of brush fire in the Kula area of the island and in the city of Lahaina (which has around 13,000 residents) first came in Tuesday and continue this weekend.
“Residents in the Auli’i Drive area were evacuated at 3:45 a.m. At 4:50 a.m. residents of Hanamu Road were also evacuated,” said the county in a Tuesday press release. “Firefighter crews from Kula, Makawao, Kahului, and Wailea are on scene. The Fire Department’s Air One helicopter was launched at daybreak to conduct aerial assessment of the fire.”
Throughout the following days, the county issued multiple updates on its website, including evacuations of certain areas, shelter in place orders and more. However, it was difficult for residents to access the information.
“The fire moved extremely fast,” said Davis. “There were hurricane winds, gusts up to 80 miles an hour. Lahaina itself is completely isolated. They’re limited with their fire department and police department. You know, shortly after about an hour after the fire broke out, we lost all phone communications.”
Amidst the chaos and confusion, Davis said she was initially was under the impression that there was no evacuation at all. Although Hawaii has a siren system for hazards, she did not hear them go off.
“No sirens went off,” she said. “The only alert that we had was about 8 p.m. It came over the radio waves. And it was very brief.”
Davis lived in a multigenerational home that burned down along with many of the structures on the island. She said that she won’t be able to recover her belongings.
“I’m completely displaced,” she explained. “You know, maybe I’ll get some FEMA money to help me, but I – I’m starting over from scratch. From the ground up, at 50 years old, I may not even have employment at this time,” as her work was impacted by the blaze too.
KNX Radio also spoke to Chris Dicus, Professor of Wildland Fire & Fuels Management with Cal Poly San Luis Obispo about what went wrong and what lessons might be learned from the Maui wildfires.
“Unfortunately, it’s the same thing I’ve seen played out in California, Australia, Europe. It’s just this lack of information and the infrastructure is just not there or it fails at the absolute worst time to reach the people that need it most at hand. So, you know, one of the things that we do in terms of communication is try to have like, you know, kind of a push alert via cell phones or other things,” he said.
Since conditions can become “pandemonium” quickly during natural disasters, with infrastructure such as communication towers burning down, Dicus said one of the most important things to consider is redundancies. That means spreading information often through many different mediums, such as sirens, radio communications, cell phone push alerts, social media posts, emails and more.
“I’ve lived through evacuations myself… you know, you have a plan, but as Mike Tyson, the boxer, once said, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’”
Davis praised the first responders on Maui, but said that the island also needs more fire department personnel. As of Saturday, the death toll from the wildfires had reached 80, according to Maui officials. Firefighters continued to extinguish flare-ups in Lahaina, Pulehu/Kihei and Upcountry Maui.
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