HONOLULU (KHON2) — The former head of the Maui Emergency Management said he had no idea of the gravity of last year’s Lahaina fire until the next day and explained why emergency sirens weren’t used on Aug. 8.
These and other details emerged in recordings of interviews conducted by investigators earlier this year on behalf of the state Attorney General. Former MEMA administrator Herman Andaya has not spoken publicly or to press about the fires since resigning shortly after the disaster.
In the hours and days following the blaze that destroyed Lahaina and parts of Upcountry Maui, several county, state and federal officials took to the podium to face a barrage of questions about accountability.
“Had we sounded the siren that night we are afraid people had gone mauka and if that was the case then they would have gone to the fire,” Andaya said in August 2023, as to why MEMA didn’t include sirens among the various forms of warnings being issued on Aug. 8.
A little more than a week after the fires, Andaya quit citing health reasons.
He sat down with investigators from the Fire Safety Research Institute, on behalf of the Attorney General, in January, for a recorded interview. In the recording released recently, Andaya and explained more about the sirens, reminding investigators he was on Oahu for a disaster management conference while others were in the Maui emergency operations center or EOC.
“I just don’t know what they were thinking at the time in the EOC,” Andaya says in the FSRI interview. “We had sort of Plan Ops officers in charge of alternative notifications. So he’s trained in that he knows when to sound the sirens. We also had in the room the our other two notification officer and communications officer, so they were both in the room. So, somehow the decision was made, they would not use that, that mode of communication, I suppose.”
An investigator asks him: “Just for the record, with the sirens, were there some issues with the sirens that would have played into any decision to use them?”
“So I heard, subsequently, I heard that some of the sirens were not operable. I think two of the three sirens were not operable,” Andaya said. “There’s mechanical failure for sirens, and they had been that way for some time. And then the other thing is, if the cellular service wasn’t working, then the sirens wouldn’t have sounded. Their (satellite) phone back up I understand wasn’t working. So the only means of activating the one siren that was what I understand was the one siren that would work, wouldn’t have, wouldn’t have sounded.”
Herman Andaya, former MEMA administrator
The state Hawaii Emergency Management Agency confirmed Hawaii’s siren system is reliant on cellular signals with satellite backup, but KHON2 is waiting to hear if reliability and redundancy have been improved for Lahaina and statewide since the fire.
As for Andaya’s personal reaction to the fire, when it sunk in how bad things had gotten, he recalled a call from the Adjutant General late at night on Aug. 8 while Andaya was still in Honolulu. The Adjutant General was asking for confirmation on the number of deaths.
“He said ‘I think there was like one or two’ but I need a specific number. So I remember my heart just sank. Someone died? I had no idea it was that many people until the next day. That’s when I learned as well from my staff and the mayor. It wasn’t until the next morning we learned the gravity,” he added.
Andaya’s is one of many recorded interviews now made public by the AG. The County said interviewees were not notified that their recorded interviews would be released as part of a pubic media presentation.
Maui Mayor Richard Bissen declined to be recorded by the FSRI but the Phase 2 data files have notes from his interview, where he recalled “nobody knew how bad it was” and “”his role was to get resources to people who needed them – not to decide what resources were needed.”
Also in the files: a confidentiality and nondisclosure agreement Hawaiian Electric had FSRI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms sign. We asked HECO and AFT if this is part of what’s holding up ATF’s disclosure of its cause and origin report.
ATF hasn’t answered. But a HECO spokesperson told KHON2: “Absolutely not, doesn’t have anything to do with that,” adding that such an agreement was “routine when disclosing sensitive information about our infrastructure.”