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Musings Report 2023-35 8-26-23 Risks, Tradeoffs and Decisions: Lessons from the Maui Fire
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Risks, Tradeoffs and Decisions: Lessons from the Maui Fire
As I mentioned last week, Lahaina and I go way back to the late 60s, and I am still in shock at the incomprehensibly tragic losses. In this Musings, I am not trying to second-guess decisions made in real time with imperfect information. My intent is to explore each critical decision that could have made a significant difference and ask: what lessons about risk assessments, tradeoffs and decisions can we take away that might inform our own lives?
Correspondent Chad D. passed along this detailed timeline of the fire from AP: In deadly Maui fires, many had no warning and no way out. Those who dodged a barricade survived.
Last week I posted this link: How the Maui wildfires devastated Lahaina, hour by hour.
As observers without first-hand knowledge, it seems there were four critical opportunities to modify the chain of events:
1. Hawaiian Electric could have cut the power to Lahaina to reduce / eliminate the potential for falling power poles to ignite fires.
2. A Fire Department crew could have been left onsite where the initial wildfire occurred and was considered extinguished, rather than send the FD unit to the fires burning near Kula (Upcountry fires).
3. Emergency sirens (two of which were solar-powered) could have been sounded.
4. Exit roads could have been cleared rather than blocked, and police or other officials could have been tasked with directing traffic out of town.
In each case, there were difficult tradeoffs.
1. In cutting off electrical power, Hawaiian Electric would likely impair communications that could be important in an emergency and at the very least, inconvenience customers in Lahaina during an emergency.
2. In idling a crew to keep watch on the Lahaina wildfire site, the modestly staffed and equipped Fire Department risked the Upcountry fire spreading due to insufficient FD personnel and equipment.
3. Reports say the County's emergency authorities feared the sirens would be interpreted as a tsunami warning, prompting residents to head uphill toward the fire rather than away from it.
4. The exit roads to the south were blocked by Hawaiian Electric crews and/or police to keep residents from possibly driving over live downed electrical wires, an understandable precaution in normal circumstances.
It is unclear how many police officers were on duty in Lahaina during the critical early hours of the fire and what their instructions were from headquarters. Officials say police sought to warn people but there is no clarity on timing. I haven't seen any reports of officers being tasked to direct traffic to open escape routes.
From time to time I've referenced US Air Force Colonel John Boyd's well-known decision-making approach, the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act), "a four-step approach to decision-making that focuses on filtering available information, putting it in context and quickly making the most appropriate decision while also understanding that changes can be made as more data becomes available."
The core of any decision-making process is the initial threat assessment, and this seems to have been a fatal flaw in all the decisions made by authorities in the Lahaina fire.
The fatal error in authorities' threat assessment was a failure to grasp the immense risk of catastrophe posed by a town of densely packed mostly wood buildings with 12,000+ residents within a stone's throw of the initial wildfire and downed power poles, a town with only three exit routes, in conditions of extremely high winds and recent drought.
In contrast, the Upcountry fire was larger but did not threaten a dense town of wooden buildings. The risk to scattered homes was real (19 homes were reportedly lost) but paled in comparison to the roughly 2,800 structures packed into Lahaina.
In other words, the tradeoffs made did not reflect the heightened risk of a wind-driven wildfire spreading into the densely packed wood buildings of Lahaina.
Several factors should have raised alarms in terms of risk assessment:
1. The proximity of the initial wildfire and downed power lines to the town. Given the high winds, this proximity meant any resurgence of the fire could leap to nearby homes and the town before any response from elsewhere on the island could arrive on site.
2. High winds posed an extreme risk of spreading embers quickly through town, potentially igniting multiple fires within a very short period of time.
3. The potential for tightly packed wood homes to catch fire, spreading the fire to nearby homes and eventually generating a conflagration that would not be controllable.
Reports say that Hawaiian Electric did not have protocols in place to shut down power in high wind conditions that heightened the risk of wildfires. Regardless of the protocols, decision-makers should have weighed the risk of a conflagration consuming densely packed wood buildings against the risk of communication breakdowns.
This highlights a key insight into the difficulties of risk / threat assessment: it's easy to be lulled by previous experiences into underestimating the apparently low probability of catastrophic outcomes. In some ways, we can't believe anything truly terrible could happen to us, simply because we have never experienced a situation that came within inches of becoming a catastrophe.
Only those who've experienced a fast-spreading wind-driven fire could know how little time residents had to act decisively.
In normal conditions, officials might have anticipated public complaints about cutting off the power as a precaution. If nothing untoward had happened, this precaution might have been criticized as an unnecessary inconvenience.
The assumption that nothing bad can happen is an example of recency bias: since nothing bad has happened recently, we discount or mis-assess the probabilities of catastrophe.
Since previous space shuttle flights hadn't blown up, it was decided to launch Challenger despite the risk posed by the cold O-rings. Since the captain of the Titanic had sailed through ice fields before without his ship hitting an iceberg and sinking, he maintained full speed through the ice field on a dark night of calm seas.
In our own lives, it's easy to make the same error of dismissing the odds of supposedly low-risk events occurring even as evidence that the odds are no longer low pile up. The inconveniences of precaution loom large while the visibly rising risks of catastrophe are discounted.
The problem is we can't go back in time to correct our error of misjudging risks based on our previous experience that "it will all work out OK." We may experience an intuition that we dismiss, to our later regret.
Or we may be confident that 1) we can drive inebriated and get away with our impaired state one more time 2) that we can look at our mobile phone while driving and nothing bad will happen because we've done so many times 3) the crowd in a foreign country won't threaten us because we've traveled extensively for decades without being endangered 4) we won't slip off the roof because we're experienced 5) we won't pass out and expire of heat prostration because we've taken many arduous hikes 6) we won't find gas stations and stores closed, and so on with events that strike us as extremely unlikely but which become more and more probable if events veer outside the boundaries of our normal lives.
In effect, the relative safety and low risks of our everyday experiences distort our threat / risk assessments and encourage a dangerous complacency based not on real experience but on recency bias and a dearth of actual experiences of risks that appeared low-probability suddenly becoming life-threatening.
Personally, I've almost been killed a number of times and escaped with modest injuries. I've fallen off roofs and tall ladders, thinking I was being reasonably cautious. I've almost passed out from dehydration on long hikes so I know it's a real risk. I've been held under water by big waves so I know drowning is a real risk. I've fallen through the ice on a lake, been pinned beneath a heavy motorcycle, and another time by a small tractor that flipped, etc.
If I didn't have these experiences, I would be blind to the risks built into each of these situations. They've taught me to be wary of overestimating safety and underestimating risks. Caution, intuition of danger, respect of risk and even fear (if managed as alertness) are all good things.
I don't consider myself a risktaker (doesn't this stuff happen to everyone?), this is just normal life: if we don't have any experience of risk, we tend to be complacent, overestimating the odds that nothing bad could happen and underestimating the odds--however remote statistically--that something catastrophic could happen.
What's the takeaway? In my opinion, the key takeaway is to be alert to conditions on the margins of our experience that greatly increase the odds of something bad happening, and taking precautionary measures to limit the risks that are visibly rising.
Broadly speaking, I tend to think we're complacent about social order, the competence of authorities to make risk assessments for us and global supply chains. All of these are actually fragile and can easily decay very rapidly. Decades of prosperity and general competence have lulled us into thinking all the systems we depend on are rock-solid when that veneer is easily pierced by chains of events that start out looking low-risk and then suddenly expand into life-threatening crises, the likes of which we've never experienced.
This is why I contextualize self-reliance as reducing risks over which we have no control and taking control of our decisions, skills, assets, resources and circumstances.
When the water at the beach recedes, it's odd, and interesting, so we stand and watch. Then the tsunami comes ashore and we realize too late that our opportunity to save ourselves slipped away as our alertness to risk and the need to take precautions failed to activate.
If you want to contribute to the relief efforts, you might consider
Hawaii Community Foundation's Maui Strong Fund.
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The Problem Isn't a Housing Shortage, It's the Concentration of Ownership by the Wealthy 8/23/23
No, Central Banks Won't Save Us This Time 8/21/23
Forced into Frugality: Charles Hugh Smith with Michael Gayed (42 min)
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Reached 1,000 free subscribers on Substack. This is small potatoes compared to those with tens of thousands of subscribers, but on my tiny dot out here in the Oort Cloud of the global Internet, I am grateful. Thank you!
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
The 8 Stages of Life That Make or Break You -- Erik Erikson...
All Alone in the Night - Time-lapse footage of the Earth as seen from the ISS (2:29 min)(via Ryan K.)
In ‘Half Earth,’ E.O. Wilson Calls For A Grand Retreat
Is Waikoloa prepared? Tragic Maui fires stir concern in the village
China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next? The economic model that took the country from poverty to great-power status seems broken, and everywhere are signs of distress.
For Single Women in China, Owning a Home Is a New Form of Resistance -- I would have said "independence" rather than resistance...
'Tesla Syndrome’ Explains Why Tech Is Making Us Miserable -- the slick substitution of actual functionality for nebulous "innovation"...
Class, Nation, and the Future - The American Mind (via BrandonRox)
The ‘abundance agenda’ explains why we’re right to always want more
The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance (1:18 hrs, via Chad D.)
The key to depression, obesity, alcoholism – and more? Why the vagus nerve is so exciting to scientists
The Secret Weapon Hackers Can Use to Dox Nearly Anyone in America for $15 (via Cheryl A.)
"There is no upper limit to what individuals are capable of doing with their minds. There is no age limit that bars them from beginning. There is no obstacle that cannot be overcome if they persist and believe." H.G. Wells
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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