Emergencies Rate Passing Mention in Address; Detailed Explanation to Public Still Unscheduled

CHORE had some fun with its Christmas gift wish list, but failures of the islands’ emergency communications system in the past two months deserve serious treatment once again.

Still unscheduled is the public briefing State Civil Defense said it would conduct to answer the public’s concerns about those failures and describe upgrades.

In her Inaugural Address yesterday, the Governor alluded in one sentence to this requirement:

“Maintaining our overall physical security requires us to continue our progress of minimizing criminal activity in our neighborhoods while constantly improving our ability to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies.”

The sentence has a “dropped-in” quality to it, and the address mentioned nothing more about a government’s primary responsibility to preserve its citizens’ safety.

CHORE will once again contact State Civil Defense to follow up on its vice director’s assertion that a staffer “will be contacting you for additional information and for a possible date we can meet with the public.”

Also unscheduled (and virtually unexamined by the media, as only one story on its activities has been published to date) is a report to the public by the Governor's Comprehensive Communications Review Committee, which has been meeting since October 17th to examine the communications failures.

What Is It with Hawaii?

We go from a truly alarming incident that's Topic #1 for the entire population to silence within weeks, as if the original emergency never happened. The media don't follow up, and officials show no sense of responsibility to report on lessons learned and what they've done to improve responsiveness.

We're going all out to observe an incident that occurred 65 years ago but show no particular interest in preparing for the one that could happen tomorrow -- or today.