The aftermath of every catastrophe includes a long period of finger-pointing and, after the devastation of Lahaina, the local emergency manager had his share. As everyone knows by now, Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator Herman Andaya controlled an advanced “all-hazards” siren warning system that remained silent as the fires burned. Two days later, Andaya resigned.
Failure to warn
From Lahaina, to Paradise, Calif., to Boulder County, Colo., to East Palestine, Ohio, we see this time and again, as government fails to meet our expectations about what it will tell us and when.
It isn’t that our government-led disaster system doesn’t work, because it does, most of the time. It is based on the principle of home rule, which means that municipal and township governments — nearly 36,000 of them at last count — bear the primary responsibility for disasters. As we say in the disaster business, they own the job. The trouble starts when the job gets too big, too fast, like it did on the afternoon of Aug. 8, 2023.
At that moment of truth there was an urgent need to execute a multitude of complex operations simultaneously, including wildfire tracking, firefighting, fire rescue, evacuation decision-making, activation and control, and public notification.
As that terrible Tuesday afternoon turned into night, Maui County faced the most difficult challenge imaginable. It was not enough for it to do a lot of things very quickly; it was forced to do everything all at once. The weaknesses of our national disaster system are thus laid bare, as are the results: chaos, confusion and death.
The essential emergency manager
Many people think that governments have some innate ability to self-organize during disasters. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Governments are slow-moving creatures of habit, ill-suited to the demands of a fast-moving crisis. Emergency managers are to provide the coordination that supercharges the government-led response.
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Emergency managers apply a consistent protocol to all. Step One is notify: provide everyone with the information they need, when they need it. Step Two is activate: bring all of the pieces — law enforcement, fire and emergency medical services, local, state and federal agencies, nonprofit, voluntary and private organizations — together immediately and seamlessly to respond.
Speaking truth to power
Even though your local government has an emergency manager, they too cannot do all of these things at the same time when the job gets too big, too fast. And because they know that they don’t have the bandwidth they need, the prospect of a catastrophe is fearsome. Most keep this to themselves, dreading the day when the black swan will come.
Just as it did, on that bone-dry summer afternoon when deadly blazes exploded into Lahaina town. Except that, in the aftermath of that catastrophe, the new emergency manager is not keeping quiet.
In a recent interview, the new MEMA administrator, Amos Lonokailua-Hewett, said that he doesn’t believe his agency should take the lead in future emergencies.
“My staffing situation is dire,” he said. “There are not enough people to accommodate all the positions and function effectively.”
A recent investigation found at least a dozen natural disasters in the U.S. during the last decade where local emergency managers failed to issue alerts in time to save lives or, in some cases, didn’t issue an alert or evacuation order at all — with Maui being only the most recent example. Woe to any community who expects otherwise, because when the time comes, those expectations will be crushed yet again.
As a working emergency manager, I am grateful to Lonokailua- Hewett for speaking the truth, a profound truth with massive implications in these dangerous times.
Local governments, from Maui to East Palestine to thousands of communities across the nation, do not have an ability to meet the needs of their communities during disasters. And, until we commit to investing in those local emergency managers, the point of every spear, they never will.
Kelly McKinney is chief of emergency management at NYU Langone Health; he formerly was deputy commissioner at the New York City Office of Emergency Management and chief disaster officer at the American Red Cross in Greater New York.
