The Departure of the Maui Emergency Management Agency after the Lahaina Fire, and the Search for Human Residuals

The chief of the Maui Emergency Management Agency has resigned and will no longer be in that position. The sudden departure comes a day after the chief, Herman Andaya, defended not using outdoor alert sirens during the wildfires.

The mayor stated that health reasons were behind Mr. Andaya’s departure. The Mayor and his team will be putting someone in this key position as soon as possible and they look forward to making that announcement soon.

The death toll is expected to go up. Five of the individuals have been identified by Maui County as being over the age of 70. Children are believed to be among the dead, according to the Maui County police chief, but their names have not been released and may not have been determined yet.

The painstaking search for human remains through a burn area of ash and debris in Lahaina will probably continue for at least another week. Forty percent of the area was scoured by Thursday morning.

Scientists have warned time and again that we have yet to see the end of fires like the ones in Lahaina and Mati as climate change and extreme weather create riskier conditions. It’s illogical to expect that any single state or local fire service would be able to fight a fire without help from the outside world. These incidents happen at the same time. The firefighters on Maui were fighting fires near Makawao and Kula when the Lahaina fire broke out.

Maui emergency officials did not use a system of 80 outdoor alert sirens to warn residents and tourists, and many people said that they did not receive cellphone alerts telling them to evacuate. By the time they realized they had to flee, the main highway connecting the town with the rest of the island was choked with traffic.

A day before Mr. Andaya resigned, he defended his agency’s decision not to use the sirens on the afternoon of Aug. 8. He said on Wednesday that the outdoor alert system along the coastline has been used to direct people toward the hills to escape a tsunami, and that he feared that sounding the sirens this time would send many residents heading toward the flames.

With very little time to leave, some people never escaped their homes, and others died in their cars as they tried to flee. A number of desperate residents felt their best option was to jump into the ocean, where they clung to rocks and huddled together, trying to avoid sparks that streamed off burning buildings and not to breathe in the noxious smoke.

The way in which this fire seems to have spread from the road to the beach is not atypical of fires spread by vegetation, slope and wind. In Mati, Greece, in 2018, a fire took about half an hour to cover one-half mile. The conditions there were similar to Maui’s, with very strong winds descending from the local mountains and pushing the fire forward. In Mati, there was no warning; 104 people died and roughly another 800 were trapped by the beach and had to be evacuated from the water. With an alert system, those lives might not have been lost. Another tragedy can have been prevented.

Islands are at a disadvantage because reinforcements need to be flown in and can take a long time to arrive. But there is a better way. During the hottest and driest summer months, Europe has put firefighters in high-risk areas, like the Greek islands. Hiring seasonal firefighters has also helped some communities there and elsewhere prepare. Hawaii, with help from the federal government, could improve its firefighting resources in these ways, too.