This blog has promoted emergency communication reform since its first post on October 17, 2006. The evidence that reform is desperately needed builds with each wildfire tragedy, and the Lahaina, Maui fire during August 8-9 is the latest.
A continuing theme here at CHORE: Warning messages intended for a mass audience require a mass medium. No wildfire can outrun a radio broadcast. Radio is the fastest and most accessible mass medium for life-saving messages to the masses. Cell phone networks and other channels are nice to have, but they’re no substitute for fast-as-lightning AM radio, which rarely if ever fails during a wildfire.
This isn’t rocket science, but as we’ve learned repeatedly in the past decade, far too many communications planners just don’t get it.
A Journalist Reports
A retired journalist who was vacationing on Maui has provided compelling validation of this blog’s promotion of AM radio as a key component of public agencies’ emergency communications plans.
Katy Bachman and her husband were staying 10 miles from Lahaina, Maui when a wildfire destroyed the town. More than 100 people died, and with hundreds still unaccounted for, the final total could be unimaginably much higher.
"We had no idea where the fires were -- or that there even were fires," she said days after returning to the mainland. “We searched for radio stations while we were sitting there charging, and that's when we heard that there were these fires and that Lahaina was being threatened…. There was no cell service and no power.”
Investigations are underway. We’ll eventually know why Maui’s emergency siren network wasn’t activated and whether radio alerts were broadcast. The tragedy that is Lahaina demands reform.
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