They typically blare once a month and help ensure Hawaii’s population will be safe during life-threatening emergencies, but the state’s outdoor warning siren system has a long history of serious — and in some cases deadly — ineffectiveness.

Sometimes, as was the tragic case in Lahaina on Aug. 8, sirens aren’t activated ahead of or even during a disaster.

There have also been instances when sirens have sounded to warn of a threat, and yet people still died.

To residents, civil defense leaders and even Gov. Josh Green, the siren warnings have varying purposes or meanings. And the roughly 10 million tourists who visit Hawaii each year generally have even less understanding of siren sounds.

“It means different things to different people,” said Richard Danforth, CEO of Genasys Inc., a company that set up an outdoor warning system with verbal message capabilities in Laguna Beach, Calif., to protect against wildfire and other dangers.

“The sirens don’t tell people what to do,” he said. “It screams of the ineffectiveness of the siren.”

Hawaii government emergency managers tout Hawaii’s “all-hazard” network of more than 410 warning sirens as the largest single integrated outdoor siren warning system for public safety in the world.

The system is meant to signal danger from all kinds of threats, including wildfires, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, dam breaches, military attacks, terrorist threats and hazardous material incidents.

Yet time and again, flaws in the system’s usefulness have been exposed, even after being integrated with other warning tools such as television messages and wireless phone emergency alerts that make up Hawaii’s Statewide Alert and Warning System.

Air raid days

The origin of Hawaii’s siren system dates back to World War II.

In 1941 before Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan on Dec. 7, a handful of sirens along with sugar mill whistles were used for blackout drills, and there was a plan to install 30 more sirens in strategic spots on Oahu.

After the war, more sirens were added in other parts of the island chain after a tsunami caused by an earthquake in Alaska hit Hawaii and killed 159 people in 1946.

Still, developing a widespread disaster alarm system was deemed too costly, and by 1958 Oahu had only 23 coastal sirens.

On Hawaii island, a small network of sirens had been developed around the Hilo waterfront due to the area’s vulnerability to tsunamis. Even then, despite sirens being sounded in advance of an approaching tsunami in 1960, many people didn’t heed the warning to evacuate, contributing to 57 deaths.

The sirens in Hilo sounded five times from 8:30-8:50 p.m. on May 22, 1960, about four hours before a series of tsunami waves hit at about 1 a.m. the next morning.

Then-Gov. William Quinn called a special session of the Legislature in part to help rehabilitate Hilo and investigate whether the siren system was defective.

A special state House committee found the system wasn’t sufficient to induce evacuations. The committee recommended improvements including a new system, full-time civil defense deputies on each island and more public education.

“Your committee is alarmed at the failure of the siren warning system in Hilo,” the report said. “It is apparent from the loss of lives in Hilo that the siren system to a great measure failed on May 23, 1960.”

The report found that some people didn’t know the meaning of the siren alert, while a few didn’t hear the sound.

Another finding was that many people believed the five siren blasts represented a preliminary warning with a final warning still to come. That practice, however, had been changed in 1959 so that only one warning would be delivered.

It was also found that some people just ignored the alarm because sirens in Hilo had been sounded on 12 occasions in the prior 14 years and no damage or death resulted in eight of the 12 instances.

Improvements, deficiencies

In the six decades since then, Hawaii’s siren system has been expanded, upgraded and used to warn of potential disasters many times.

Some of these occasions included a localized earthquake and tsunami on Hawaii island in 1975; Hurricane Iniki, which inflicted huge damage on Kauai in 1992; Hurricane Fernanda, which threatened Hawaii island in 1993; a tsunami that didn’t materialize on Oahu in 1994; and the volcanic eruption that ripped through the Leilani Estates subdivision on Hawaii island in 2018.

Yet operational decisions and public understanding during the same period have not been good at times.

After Hurricane Iwa ripped across the state in 1982 and injured 136 people on Oahu, the Honolulu City Council said in a 1983 report that fundamental changes in civil defense operations were needed and that some sirens failed to sound.

“A large number of people in low-lying damage-prone areas were waiting for sirens or other specific official announcements directing them to either make preparations and be ready to evacuate on notice if necessary, or evacuate,” the report said.

Part of the problem then was that 117 sirens on Oahu were dependent on the electric grid, and in areas where power went out no warning sounded.

Today, there are more than 410 sirens statewide, including about 150 added in the past decade. A high concentration of sirens is in coastal areas, though they are also in upland communities and valleys far from the ocean.

The system today uses batteries recharged by sunlight to power sirens that can be activated individually.

Triggering the system can be done by the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency or county civil defense agencies.

According to HI-EMA, some less-populated coastal areas aren’t covered by the siren system today. Warnings to these areas are dependent on Civil Air Patrol or emergency responder agency aircraft flying low and broadcasting an alert.

Mixed messages

One shortcoming of the siren system is that it means different things to different residents, often depending on how long and where they have lived in Hawaii.

Much of the local population refers to the system as “tsunami warning sirens” even though the most common warning sound, a steady tone, is an “attention alert” signal telling people to seek out information conveyed by government officials on radio, TV, social media and cell phones.

For many decades, the monthly siren tests included two signals — the “attention alert” as well as a wailing tone signaling a man-made attack where the response should be to seek indoor shelter. There is also a third alert specifically for areas around Campbell Industrial Park, including portions of Kalaeloa, Kapolei, Ewa Beach, Makakilo and Nanakuli where a whooping tone signifies a hazardous materials incident.

HI-EMA in December 2017 tried to raise awareness of the attack signal by including it in monthly tests after not doing so for several decades.

But after two such monthly tests, the wailing tone test was discontinued after HI-EMA botched an internal test of the broader warning system and sent out wireless phone alerts to the public on Jan. 13, 2018 that read: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Many thousands of people, including tourists, feared impending death for 38 minutes until a correction was sent.

For some, there was one suspected bit of comfort during the incident in that the disaster warning sirens did not sound, except for some on military bases.

Lahaina burns

On Aug. 8, Maui Emergency Management Agency officials deliberately did not activate sirens to warn people in Lahaina that a brush fire driven by fierce winds above the town of over 12,000 people was advancing into the community. The agency did send wireless phone, TV and radio alerts, but many people did not have power or cell service and received no warning.

Eight days after the inferno that killed at least 115 people, then-MEMA administrator Herman Andaya said the sirens weren’t activated because they are used primarily for tsunamis and because the public is trained to respond by seeking higher ground.

“Had we sounded the siren that night, we were afraid that people would have gone mauka, and if that were the case, they would have gone into the fire,” he said.

Andaya also said that a lot of people indoors wouldn’t have heard the sirens.

According to MEMA, four of Maui’s 80 sirens are in Lahaina, giving complete or near complete warning coverage to the community.

The alert distance for each siren varies with topography, but generally is good for about two-thirds of a mile, according to HI-EMA.

Andaya’s defense for not using the sirens has been ridiculed, given that some people who may have initially headed mauka, or toward the mountains, would have noticed the fire and perhaps escaped. Instead, remains of some victims have been found in their homes. Andaya resigned the day after he explained his rationale not to use the sirens.

The day before Andaya resigned, Green said a comprehensive review of the disaster warning system was underway, and he also acknowledged one of the system’s shortcomings from a public perception view.

Green said that when he first moved to Hawaii as an emergency medicine doctor, people told him that if he heard a warning siren it indicated a tsunami threat and the need to move to high ground.

The governor, who back then lived in part of Kau on Hawaii island near Punaluu Beach, also said there were frequent mauka wildfires in the area.

“In those cases, had a siren gone off, I would have been expecting a tsunami to come,” Green said. “That’s what our mentality was.”

Christina Hill, who was born in 1997 and raised in Kailua but now lives in a tsunami hazard area near Sandy Beach in East Honolulu, said the first thing she would do in response to a siren warning would be to check her phone or go online because she doesn’t have cable TV.

Makakilo resident J.R. Balmilero recounted an experience about six years ago when his wife and son fled their ridge-side house after seeing heavy smoke from a fire in a nearby gulch that melted a neighbor’s fence.

Now, Balmilero would hope that emergency sirens would be used to warn him of a wildfire danger. But he also said he can’t really hear the monthly siren tests from inside his house even though the nearest siren is about a third of a mile away down the mountain.

“I don’t really hear anything,” he said, adding that his impression of the siren system purpose is not for fire. “As locals,” the 56-year-old said, “we’re so conditioned that it’s a tsunami or a hurricane.”

Learning from experience

Brendan Manning, emergency operations coordinator in Laguna Beach, knows the shortcomings of typical siren systems with public interpretation. But for the past several years he has had a warning system that can clearly explain a danger and what people should do.

This system uses 360-degree loudspeaker arrays atop poles to convey programmed or custom voice instructions after an alert sound is used to attract attention.

Manning said the coastal city below a mountainous area with wildfire risk used to have three traditional sirens that were installed because of tsunami risk. Over the past few years, the city has installed 23 speaker arrays and used some of them two different times in 2022 for wildfire evacuations.

The 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif., that killed 85 people prompted Laguna Beach officials to make the change.

“One of the lessons learned from the Camp Fire was the need for additional alert and warning pathways beyond the traditional phone, text, email, media, and social media,” Manning said. “The City (of Laguna Beach) determined that a robust system of outdoor warning speakers, targeting the wildland urban interface areas, would provide an additional means of notifying during a fast-moving wildfire.”

The system provider, Genasys, has its equipment in use by close to 100 government entities. The biggest user, according to the company, is Japan where there are 525 sites with more than 1,000 speaker arrays that were sought out after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima.

Danforth, the company’s CEO, said the cost of the system can be around $50,000 per device where traditional siren infrastructure exists.

Adam Weintraub, a HI-EMA spokesperson, said similar technology was explored for Hawaii previously and wasn’t feasible. However, he said it’s possible that a reexamination is made.

In the meantime, new emergency managers on Maui are now using the siren system to warn of fire.

On Aug. 26, MEMA activated four sirens in response to a brush fire that broke out in Kaanapali. Evacuations ensued, and firefighters kept the 7-acre blaze from reaching populated portions of the community.