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9 Key Revelations in Maui's First Review of the Lahaina Inferno

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Six months after a firestorm devastated the town of Lahaina, Hawaii, a detailed new report on the tragedy reveals that a large number of victims died on one street – a clear indication of the ferocity of the blaze that tore through the historic island city. Kill 100 people.

The 98 page report from the Maui Police Department on the August 8 disaster came after months of pressure to provide more information about the fire and the government's response to it, which has been criticized for failing to adequately warn residents in time to could evacuate.

It provides a detailed timeline of a fire that started in the morning hours near a downed power line, then flared up in the afternoon and burned through the city for hours. As residents fled for their lives, many were unable to leave as major exit routes were blocked by downed power lines, trees and the raging fire itself.

The fire claimed victims over a distance of more than two miles, and possibly for many hours, the report showed, including in neighborhoods that were already on fire before evacuation warnings were issued.

Here are nine key revelations from the report.

Some fire victims were found in the northern part of the city, and another cluster was discovered in the south, according to Maui County maps.

But the majority were in the city center. About a third of them were found along Kuhua Street, a short road with homes on one side, about half a mile offshore. That street dead ends to the west, and survivors have described struggling to escape to the east because a fallen tree blocked the roadway.

Among the dead along Kuhua Street was the fire's youngest victim, 7-year-old Tony Takafua, who died along with several family members. Many others also died on neighboring residential streets as those with little warning of the fire struggled to escape amid thick smoke and flying embers.

The report also found that less than half of the victims – 42 in total – were found inside buildings, while 39 were found outside. Fifteen others were found in vehicles, and one in the ocean. Three more people were taken to a hospital before being pronounced dead.

A detailed timeline of events details a series of calls to emergency services, reporting a fast-spreading fire at 2:55 p.m. Officers soon began evacuating neighboring areas, the report said.

But it is not investigating the province's delay before issuing a broader evacuation alert. The province decided not to use the siren system that carries all the risks and waited until 4:16 p.m. to send an evacuation warning via mobile phone. That warning targeted residential areas above Honoapi'ilani Highway.

The fire had already consumed a large part of the evacuation area. At the exact moment the evacuation warnings went out, the new timeline shows, officers reported that the fire had spread all the way to the highway and jumped across the road — toward areas of the waterfront that had never received an evacuation warning.

The after-action report showed that the Maui Emergency Management Agency “fully activated” its emergency operations center at 5:50 p.m., about three hours after the fire had quickly spread. By then the fire had spread over a mile through the city; Many buildings on the famous Front Street went up in flames.

The report does not investigate why the operations center waited so long before being fully activated. It had been partially activated the day before, when weather forecasters warned of the likelihood of very strong winds. The agency's emergency management chief, Herman Andaya, was away from Maui attending a conference at the time of the fires; he resigned in the following days.

The timeline shows that the fire, which flared up shortly before 3 p.m., continued to spread into new parts of the city hours later. Four hours later, after 7 p.m., the report describes the fire moving south toward homes where some victims were later found dead, suggesting that long after the fire had turned into a full-blown crisis, residents who may not have initially put themselves in danger had seen – or who could not evacuate – were overcome.

According to the report, the fire began to threaten a neighborhood on the city's north side after 8 p.m., near where other victims were also discovered.

Fire officials have said that as the fire spread, their hydrants in Lahaina went dry because the water system was collapsing.

Authorities found that many false claims were put forth on the Internet in the wake of the fire, including inflated death toll figures, suggestions that a mysterious beam of light had started the fire, and a particularly widespread conspiracy theory that Maui officials downplayed or covered up kept. the number of missing and murdered children.

The report says that Maui police had been in contact with the state's education department, which was able to contact “all of their students,” including those who had left Maui or Hawaii altogether, ruling out any possibility that there was children were missing.

Officials had been reviewing social media posts daily, the report said, looking for videos and firsthand accounts of the fire, but the report recommended hiring a full-time social media manager.

As authorities searched for thousands of people initially missing after the fire, many of those people turned out to be safe. However, four people are still classified as 'missing'.

Reference has been made to those cases a cold case unit which will attempt to determine whether the individuals are alive somewhere, and, if not, whether their remains can be discovered and identified.

The report highlights some of the extraordinary challenges that made responding to the fire particularly difficult.

Cell phone service failed. Individual remains were sometimes mixed together during collection, making identification difficult and time-consuming. In some cases, mortuary workers had to do their work on portable tables placed outside.

In one case, a police officer used straps tied to his vehicle to tear down a fence, creating an escape route. In another case, a firefighter had to borrow a police officer's vehicle.

Officials provided relatively few details about the rapidly expanding emergency in the early hours of the fire, and the after-action report does little to explain why.

Citizens called emergency services 17 times in the first minutes of the eruption, and desperate efforts to evacuate flooded neighborhoods took place throughout the afternoon. But when Mayor Richard Bissen appeared on the news at 6 p.m., he seemed unaware of the severity of the fire and said he was “pleased to report” that a road had reopened.

At a press conference a few weeks after the fire, Mr. Bissen said declined to say when he learned that the fire had become a crisis. As pressure grew in his office to say more, he eventually acknowledged that he had not known anyone had died until the next morning. He said the severity of the fire was unclear in part because “our firefighters and police on the ground have focused all their efforts and actions on helping people.”

The new after-action report notes that power and cell phone service were reduced during the fire, but officers were still able to communicate via police radio.

The report contains dozens of recommendations for how to respond to major emergencies in the future. The report noted that officers outside their vehicles had difficulty hearing radio transmissions in the wild winds, and recommended that officers be given earplugs. With so many roads blocked by trees or power lines, the report recommended equipping some police vehicles with demolition kits that could be used to remove roadblocks.

Other recommendations focused on encouraging the use of body-worn cameras in dispatch, increasing training for disaster response and death investigations, and installing more real-time surveillance cameras across the country to help monitor conditions and warn of possible emergencies before they become life-threatening.

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