HONOLULU (KHON2) — Better communication. More training. Even using artificial intelligence. Those were just some of the improvements that officials with Honolulu’s emergency management team mentioned as ways to help Oahu deal with emergencies.
Gridlock during the tsunami warning. Evacuations for the fire in Maili. These emergencies don’t happen every day, but state and county leaders have to make sure we are ready for them.
“We need to always keep improving,” said Rep. Della Au Belatti, state House Public Safety Committee Chair.
So leaders at Honolulu’s Department of Emergency Management testified in front of the House Public Safety Committee Thursday to figure out what the city has learned from these incidents, and what it can do to be better.
“In this plan, in May, they were talking about the high need to identify evacuation routes,” said Belatti. “A month ago, we experienced a tsunami threat, and we see that we actually haven’t followed through and designed the proper evacuation plans.”
“Sometimes it can be complicated and very chaotic and certainly at the timing of when this one happened, it didn’t help matters any,” said Dr. Randal Collins, Honolulu Department of Emergency Management Director. “But that being said, we were able to work collectively across government sectors to get the people to safety, upward and inward.”
Dealing with the Maili fire, DEM Director Collins talked about possibly having someone from the department at the city’s traffic center to have a 24/7 presence, training emergency responders for a unified command post, and using AI for early warnings for evacuation times and areas.
As for the tsunami warning, Collins said they want to improve communication with the public – make messages more county-specific versus something general for the entire state.
“In one case, I remember one of the transcripts saying one of the sirens are going to go off,” said Collins. “Well, okay, you know it’s fine. We don’t wanna alert, we don’t wanna scare people, but the whole point is to give instructions that as to what we want.”
City officials say that after action plans typically take up to 90 days to complete. That Maili fire and the Tsunami warning both happened in July, so they say the findings right now are preliminary. They are scheduled to meet with state officials on their final findings in October.
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“There’s a whole laundry list of things the city and state needs to be doing to improve and ensure that during times of emergency, we as a community can act and act quickly,” said Belatti.