Hawaii Democratic Representative Jill Tokuda Admits They Underestimated ‘Lethalness, Speed ​​of Fire’ in Maui Hawaii on CNN

Dem Hawaii Rep. Jill Tokuda, admitted Saturday morning in an interview with CNN that the state had “underestimated the lethality and speed of fire.”

She said no plan has been put in place for possible failures of the emergency alert system typically received on mobile phones. There was no mobile phone coverage in the area at the time.

“It’s not like hurricane-force winds are unknown to Hawaii, or dry brush or red flag conditions,” she said.

The death toll now stands at 80 – and that figure is expected to rise further, with thousands of people still missing and rescuers still having to search the many razed properties.

More than 2,200 buildings here have been reduced to ashes, forcing at least 1,400 residents to flee to emergency shelters across the island.

The Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) and FEMA estimate the cost of the rebuild at $5.52 billion.

In 2018, as Hurricane Lane approached Hawaii, wildfires raged across 2,330 acres in Maui.

A year later, 25,000 acres had been scorched — yet Hawaii’s emergency management agency described the risk of wildfires to human life as “low.”

“We saw this before in (Hurricane) Lane. We didn’t learn our lesson from Lane (in 2018) – that wildfires can break out due to swirling hurricane winds below us in the south,” Tokuda said. “We have to make sure we do better.”

Speaking to CNN’s Amara Walker on “This Morning,” Tokuda dodged questions about whether anyone should be held accountable — instead focusing her attention on the “hundreds, if not thousands, who are still missing.”

On the one hand, we have an absolute duty to go in there and we want to save, salvation is the hope, but in many cases those who caused it recover,” she replied without blaming.

Furious survivors of the deadly wildfire ask why HawaiiThe company’s famous emergency warning system failed to warn them as the flames raced toward their homes.

With the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, the records say the warning sirens weren’t even activated.

However, other layers of emergency were activated, including mobile phone alerts and messages on television and radio stations.

“Our examination of Hawaii Emergency Management Agency logs indicates that no sirens were activated on Maui during the wildfire incident,” Adam Weintraub told CNN.

“No one at the state or the district has tried to activate those sirens based on our data.”

The statewide public safety alert has about 400 sirens to warn residents of natural disasters, on Maui there are 80.

“It was largely a function of how fast the flames were moving,” he said of not activating the vaunted all-hazard emergency siren system.

“They were trying to coordinate the response on the ground, and they had issued all these other warning systems.”

Residents were forced to escape the inferno on foot, with some saying it only took five to 10 minutes for the situation to become desperate for them.

Many Lahaina survivors said they heard no sirens and only realized they were in danger when they saw flames or heard explosions nearby.

Fueled by a dry summer and high winds from a passing hurricane, the fire started Tuesday and caught Maui by surprise, racing through parched undergrowth that blanketed the island and then flattening homes and anything else in its path.

Lahaina’s wildfire risk was well known. Maui County’s Risk Mitigation Plan, last updated in 2020, found that Lahaina and other West Maui communities are regularly ignited by wildfires and that a large number of buildings are at risk of wildfire damage.

West Maui was also found to have the most people on the island living in multi-unit housing, the second highest percentage of vehicleless households, and the highest percentage of non-English speakers.

“This may limit the population’s ability to receive, understand and take appropriate action during hazardous events,” the plan said.

Maui’s firefighting efforts may also have been hampered by a small staff, said Bobby Lee, the president of the Hawaii Firefighters Association. There are up to 65 firefighters on duty in Maui County at any given time, and they are responsible for fighting fires on three islands — Maui, Molokai and Lanai — he said.

Those crews have about 13 fire engines and two ladder trucks, but all are designed for road use. The department has no off-road vehicles, which allows crews to thoroughly attack wildfires before they reach roads or populated areas, he said.

That forces firefighters to wait for wildfires to reach an area where they can attack it with fire engines and other equipment, Lee said. The strong winds brought on by Hurricane Dora made that extremely difficult, he said.

“You’re basically dealing with fighting a blowtorch,” Lee said. “You have to be careful—you don’t want to be caught downwind, because you’ll get run over in a wind-driven fire of that size.”

The wildfire is already the deadliest natural disaster in the state since a tsunami in 1960 that killed 61 people on the Big Island.