Lahaina Fire — Maui

The siren decision is contested. The official explanation — that sirens are associated with tsunamis and would prompt people to move uphill, toward the fire — has some basis in behavioral research on warning compliance. But it has also been sharply criticized, because the alternative was silence, and 102 people died with little or no warning.

The deeper issue is that this was a decision made under pressure, about a system that had only one default use case in public memory. If sirens only ever mean "move to high ground," then their activation during a downhill wildfire threat is genuinely ambiguous — not because sirens are a bad idea, but because nobody had built the message infrastructure to go with them.

This is a pre-incident planning failure, not a dispatch failure. The decision to activate or not activate sirens during a wildfire was made by emergency managers, not dispatchers. But dispatchers operate in the environment that decision creates. If your jurisdiction's outdoor alert system has only one public meaning, that gap needs to be on your radar.

Alert systems without public education are half-systems. Lahaina residents knew the monthly siren test. They didn't have a shared mental model for "siren + wildfire." The result was that activating the system might have caused harm. That's a systemic failure of preparedness communication that predates August 8, 2023 by years.

The question for your center: What does your outdoor alert system mean to residents in your area? Is there one meaning, or multiple? Do people know what to do when they hear it during a wildfire vs. a flood vs. a chemical release? If the answer is "I don't know," that's information worth surfacing.

Cell phone alerts were issued at 4:16 PM — just as the cell towers were failing. The two redundant systems — sirens and cell alerts — were both unavailable at the moment they were needed most, for opposite reasons. One was not activated. One couldn't get through. This is what total alert system collapse looks like.

This is a textbook coordination gap: two agencies operating correctly within their own lanes, with no shared picture of the whole problem. Maui PD dispatch asked a specific, accurate question. Hawaiian Electric gave a specific, accurate answer. But the question was about the wrong road, and neither side realized it.

The failure was framing, not intent. Dispatch asked about one road. The information they needed was about another road. In a chaotic incident with overwhelmed personnel and failing communications, this kind of narrow framing is common and predictable. The fix is not smarter people — it's better protocols that force the broader question.

When you're coordinating with a utility during a wildfire MCI, the right question isn't "is this specific line de-energized?" It's "what is the status of all lines in the evacuation corridor, and can you clear us to use these specific roads?" That's a different question and requires a different answer — and it needs to be asked explicitly.

The second failure was that nobody owned the evacuation route picture. Police were blocking Highway 30. Dispatch was asking about a different road. Nobody had the job of mapping "here are all blocked routes, here is what we know about each one, here is who is working to clear them." In a mass evacuation, that function needs to exist and be assigned.

For your center: When you coordinate with a utility company during an emergency, do you have a protocol for what questions to ask? Do you know the name and direct number for the utility's emergency operations center? Have you ever run a tabletop that includes a utility coordination scenario?

Five to six channels means five to six simultaneous information streams, each of which can carry a critical transmission at any moment. Human beings can attend to one audio stream meaningfully at a time. Everything else becomes background noise until a tone, a word, or volume change triggers attention. In a calm period, this is manageable. In a mass casualty incident, it means systematic information loss.

What gets missed: Low-urgency-sounding transmissions that turn out to be critical. Requests that come in while attention is on a different channel. Radio traffic that escalates gradually rather than with a sudden change. A unit reporting they're lost, or surrounded, or running out of water — on a channel nobody's actively monitoring at that second.

The research baseline: APCO and NENA standards recognize that radio channel monitoring load is a direct factor in dispatcher cognitive overload and error rates. Most centers have internal policies that try to limit single-operator channel loads during MCIs. Whether those policies are honored when staffing is thin is a different question.

What your center can build around this: Channel assignment protocols for MCIs — who owns which channel, with clear hand-off procedures. Supervisor monitoring during surge events. CAD flags that alert when a unit hasn't transmitted in a defined period. Mutual aid activation triggers before saturation, not after.

The honest conversation: If your center runs minimum staffing on a Tuesday night and a wildfire or major incident starts, how many channels will one dispatcher be monitoring? Is that number survivable? Has anyone done the math?

This is the dispatch nightmare: the system you rely on to receive calls fails during the event. The Lahaina 911 outage is an extreme case, but partial system failures during major incidents are not rare. Every center needs to know the answer to this question before it needs to use it.

Know your PSAP's continuity of operations plan (COOP). What is the backup when your primary 911 system fails? Is there a secondary PSAP that can receive overflow? Is there a backup call center number that can be published? Who authorizes activating it, and how fast can that happen?

Know where public notification goes when cell and internet are down. Social media is nearly useless to people without power or cell service — exactly the people most affected by the event. Broadcast radio (AM/FM) remains the most resilient mass communication medium in infrastructure failure scenarios. Does your PSAP have a relationship with a local radio station that can push emergency messaging? Is that relationship tested?

Door-to-door notification is a real option and sometimes the only option. In Lahaina, residents who survived often got warning from neighbors, from seeing smoke, or from police driving through neighborhoods. When electronic systems fail, human-to-human notification becomes the alert system. This should be a planned function, not an improvised one.

Amateur radio (HAM) networks. Most counties have an Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) group with trained operators who can establish communications when infrastructure is down. Do you know who your county ARES coordinator is?

The morning Lahaina fire was legitimately contained as of 9:00 AM. Firefighters followed standard protocol and left the scene. The weather conditions that caused it to reignite — 80-mph winds, extreme drought, National Weather Service red flag warnings — were all known. The question is not whether the "contained" call was wrong at 9:00 AM. It's whether conditions should have maintained a higher state of alertness than standard procedure allowed.

Dispatcher's role with a "resolved" incident during red flag conditions: You don't override fire command. But if conditions in your service area are at NWS red flag warning level, you should be in a heightened state of awareness on any fire calls, even ones that have been declared contained. That means closer attention to follow-up calls from the area, faster escalation of any reports of smoke or reignition, and awareness that "contained" under extreme wind conditions is provisional.

Information that contradicts a closed incident is a flag, not a nuisance. If the incident is closed and a caller reports smoke from the same area, that is not a false alarm to be dismissed — it's a datapoint that needs rapid escalation and verification. Your job is to get that information to someone who can act on it quickly, with enough urgency that it's treated as a potential reignition, not a stale call.

NWS red flag warnings are operationally relevant to dispatch. A red flag warning means extreme fire behavior is possible. In a fire-prone service area, that should change your posture on any fire-adjacent calls for the duration of the warning. Know what that means for your center — is there a protocol, or is it left to individual dispatcher judgment?

The Maui County hazard mitigation plan from 2020 identified Lahaina as lying within a high risk zone for wildfire. The National Interagency Fire Center's August 2023 seasonal outlook, issued August 1, forecast "above normal" fire potential for Hawaii's leeward sides for that month. Both documents existed and were available. The question of who reads them and how they inform operational posture is a pre-incident preparedness question — but dispatchers are part of that ecosystem.