Hawaii has a robust emergency siren warning system. It sat silent during the deadly wildfires::Some Maui residents are questioning the effectiveness of the emergency warning system employed as the wildfires spread rapidly across Lahaina and other parts on Tuesday. Hawaii’s attorney general is leading a review of the emergency response.
Don’t quote me, but I remember someone they were interviewing on NPR say the system wasn’t activated because it was a tsunami warning system, which tells residents to go to higher ground, and in this case going to higher ground would be suicide.
Yes, this is what gets me too. If they had sounded the sirens, people are taught to take a certain action. That action (get to higher ground) would have caused a different type of confusion. So I can understand that some government employees sat there discussing it and ruled it out because the action they needed people to take, was not going to happen with the siren. I really don’t know what they would have told me people to do. Everything was moving so fast that giving coordinated evacuation instructions would have been damn near impossible. I don’t think the warning systems really would have done much, when you think through it.
How is a system with 400 alarms the largest in the world? I couldn’t find the numbers for Germany but in Austria there are over 8000 sirens. Does anyone know more about that?
The claim in the article has a link to the state’s site, where it actually says:
Hawaiʻi has the largest single integrated Outdoor Siren Warning System for Public Safety in the world.
“Single integrated” is probably key here.
What does that even mean? I read the source, too, but I honestly don’t understand this sentence.
I did some research: It seems Hawaii boasts they hve the largest network of siren Alarms in the world. That cannot be true, even if you consider sirens per area. Hawaii has about one siren per 70(!!) square kilometer. Austria has about one siren per 10 square kilometer. European countries have extensive networks of warning sirens. Other examples are Switzerland with a siren per 9.8 sqkm (8200 total) and the Netherlands with one siren per 10.9 sqkm (3800 in total). I really don’t know which numbers would suggest that Hawaii has the largest system of Sirens in the world. If anything, the number of sirens seems excessively small. Also, for any Americans wondering: Air raid sirens in European countries trigger for natural disaster and other dangers to citizens too (like large fires)
It’s the largest in the USA, therefore it’s the largest in the world! Americans can’t point their country on a map, you think they know what Germany and Austria are?
