Maui wildfire alert system failure highlights critical gaps in disaster planning
COMPREHENSIVE WARNINGS, ALL SILENCED
The State of Hawaii calls its All-hazard Statewide Outdoor Warning Siren System the “largest single integrated public safety outdoor siren warning system in the world.” It has over 400 solar-powered sirens – 80 of them on the Maui archipelago – capable of alerting residents to a wide range of natural and human-caused events, such as hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, terrorist threats, and wildfires.
The sirens are a critical part of the more broadly scaled Statewide Alert and Warning System (SAWS), which uses the Federal Emergency...