WAILUKU, Hawaii — In the hours before a wildfire engulfed the town of Lahaina, Maui County officials failed to activate sirens that would have warned the entire population of the approaching flames and instead relied on a series of sometimes confusing social media posts that reached a much smaller audience.
Power and cellular outages for residents further stymied communication efforts. Radio reports were scarce, some survivors reported, even as the blaze began to consume the town. Roadblocks then forced fleeing drivers onto one narrow downtown street, creating a bottleneck that was quickly surrounded by flames on all sides.
At least 106 people had been confirmed dead as of Wednesday morning, Aug. 16, with the number expected to climb higher.
The silent sirens have raised questions about whether everything was done to alert the public in a state that possesses an elaborate emergency warning system for a variety of dangers including wars, volcanoes, hurricanes and wildfires.
Hector Bermudez left his apartment at Lahaina Shores shortly after 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 8, after the smell of smoke woke him up from a nap. He asked his neighbor if he was also leaving.
“He said, ‘No, I am waiting for the authorities to see what they are going to do,’” Bermudez recounted. “And I said, ‘No, no, no, please go. This smoke is going to kill us. You have to go. Please. You gotta get out of here. Don’t wait for nobody.’”
His neighbor, who is about 70 and has difficulty walking, refused.
Bermudez doesn’t know if he survived.
Hawaii’s Attorney General Anne Lopez said her office will be conducting a comprehensive review of decision-making and policies surrounding the wildfires.
The Associated Press created a timeline of the wildfires, using information from multiple sources including the county’s announcements, state and local Emergency Management Alerts and interviews with officials and survivors. It shows public updates on the fires were spotty and often vague, and much of the county’s attention was focused on another dangerous, larger fire in Upcountry Maui that was threatening neighborhoods in Kula.
The timeline shows no indication that county officials ever activated the region’s all-hazard siren system and reveals other emergency alerts were scarce.
The Upcountry fire started first, reported not long after midnight on Tuesday, Aug. 8, and the first evacuations near Kula followed.
As the fires grew, power went out early that morning, leaving several thousand customers in the Lahaina/West Maui region and Upcountry without electricity.
By 11 a.m., firefighting crews from several towns and the Hawaii Department of Lands had converged on the Upcountry fire, but wind gusts reaching 80 mph made conditions unsafe for helicopters. At 3:20 p.m., more Upcountry neighborhoods were evacuated.
The Lahaina fire, meanwhile, had escaped containment and forced the closure of the Lahaina Bypass road by 3:30 p.m. The announcement, however, didn’t make it into a county fire update until 4:45 p.m. and didn’t show up on the county Facebook page until nearly 5 p.m., when survivors say flames were surrounding the cars of families trapped downtown.
But while the Lahaina fire was spreading, Maui County and Hawaii Emergency Management Agency officials were making other urgent announcements — including a Facebook post about additional evacuations near the Upcountry fire and an announcement that the acting governor had issued an emergency proclamation.
In the Upcountry evacuation Facebook post at 3:20 p.m., Fire Assistant Chief Jeff Giesea shared an ominous warning.
“The fire can be a mile or more from your house, but in a minute or two, it can be at your house,” Giesea said.
By late afternoon, many were already running from the flames. Lynn Robison evacuated from her apartment near the Lahaina waterfront’s Front Street at 4:33 p.m.
“There was no warning. There was absolutely none. Nobody came around. We didn’t see a fire truck or anybody,” Robison said.
Lana Vierra left her neighborhood about a mile away around the same time. Her boyfriend had stopped by and told her he’d seen the approaching fire on the drive.
“He told me straight, ‘People are going to die in this town; you gotta get out,’” she recalled. There had been no sirens, no alerts on her cellphone, she said.
But access to the main highway — the only road leading in and out of Lahaina — was cut off by barricades set up by authorities. The roadblocks forced people directly into harm’s way, funneling cars onto Front Street.
Nathan Baird and his family escaped by driving past a barricade, he told Canadian Broadcaster CBC Radio.
“Traffic was all over the place. Nobody knew where to go. They were trying to make everybody go up to the Civic Center and ... it just didn’t make sense to me,” Baird said. “I was so confused. At first, I was like, ‘Why are all these people driving toward the fire?’”
Riley Curran, who fled his Lahaina home after climbing up a neighboring apartment building to get a better look at the fire, doesn’t think there is anything the county could have done.
“It’s not that people didn’t try to do anything. It’s that it was so fast no one had time to do anything,” Curran said. “The fire went from 0 to 100.”
Karl Kim directs the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center, a University of Hawaii-based organization that develops training materials to help officials respond to natural disasters.
Kim said it’s too soon to know exactly how the warning and alert system might have saved more lives in Lahaina. He noted that wildfires are often more challenging to manage than volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and even earthquakes because they are more difficult to detect and track over time.
“I think it’s a wake-up call,” he said. “We have to invest more in understanding of wildfires and the threats that they provide, which aren’t as well understood.”
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