This System Might Have Saved Lives in Lahaina

Emergency Speakers that Speak

I’m in a foul mood.

I usually end the month with a Dumb & Dumber column, ticking off financial and regulatory foibles with a lighthearted sprinkling of sarcasm. For example, this month’s D&D could’ve pointed out that the U.S. Senate has become a nursing home, where Dianne Feinstein still votes on legislation even though her daughter has reportedly been granted power of attorney, and where Mitch McConnell is “medically clear to work” after freezing up… again.

No wonder everyone’s learning how to pronounce Vivek Ramaswamy.

There were many, many other Dumb & Dumber candidates in August. I could’ve mentioned how the Pac-12 is now the Pac-4, becoming the Conference of Chumpions. Or how the head of the Spanish soccer federation just kissed his career goodbye, despite his mother’s hunger strike. Or that ex-con Billy McFarland may be seriously considering another attempt to stage the Fyre Festival, claiming the first set of tickets have sold out. Or maybe I would’ve mentioned that fellow ex-con Martin “Pharma Bro” Shkreli is back on the market. He posted a Google doc for potential gfs, asking questions like, “What is the link to your GitHub?” 

Or I could’ve highlighted — as always — Elon Musk. There were plenty of negative headlines, like the glass house Tesla may have considered building for Elon. Tesla is also accused of lying about battery range, and the first lawsuits are coming to trial over deaths that may have occurred when people let their Teslas drive themselves.

But August also saw a new and troubling level of investigations and accusations into the world’s richest man which gave me pause.

In a New Yorker article titled, “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule,” Ronan Farrow reports that the Pentagon panicked when Musk threatened to cut off access in Ukraine to SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. Ukrainian forces desperately need Starlink to communicate. 

Did I mention that Elon had been providing the service for free? SpaceX claimed it was costing the company $400 million. So Elon’s the bad guy because he wanted to get paid? Were Boeing and Lockheed Martin sending over free missiles to Ukraine? Any free tanks from General Dynamics?

No.

Meantime, they must have a full-time division at the Justice Department dedicated to finding all the ways Elon can be prosecuted. One DOJ press release this month announced that the feds are suing SpaceX for discrimination because the company allegedly refused to hire refugees or “aslyees.”

Wait. Wait wait wait…

SpaceX — the only rocket company currently capable of sending astronauts to the space station from American soil and which also handles many of the military’s most secretive satellite launches — only hires American citizens or green card holders?

OUTRAGEOUS!

And of allllllll the companies in America to investigate, the Justice Department decides to go after this one for allegedly discriminating against asylees —who were no doubt thoroughly vetted by our government.

Sigh.

In the end, I didn’t follow through and write an entire Dumber & Dumber column because I’m too depressed about what was clearly the most epic and tragic example of bad fiscal priorities and poor leadership this month — the state of Hawaii.

Paradise Lost

The Aloha State is my second home, and Hawaiians like to tell those of us who come over from the mainland that we need to honor and care for the land, and they’re right. Meanwhile, Hawaiian authorities do a lousy job of it. When fires moved quickly through Lahaina on August 8, everything that could go wrong, did.

Cellphone alerts were useless when the system went down. Roads were blocked. A request to divert water to fight the fires was denied until it was too late, reportedly because a water official was waiting for input from a downstream farmer who grows taro. “People have been fighting against the release of water to fight fires,” Gov. Josh Green told reporters. “I’ll leave that to you to explore.” (Sorry, guv, that’s your job.)

Media investigations show that fire officials had long warned about the risks of invasive grasses growing over abandoned sugar plantations near Lahaina, but they were not taken seriously. Hawaiian Electric often referred to wildfire risk in regulatory filings, “but it waited years to take significant action,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “During that period, the company was undertaking a state-mandated shift to renewable energy.”

Most astounding are reports that authorities didn’t sound alarms because they were afraid people might think there was a tsunami coming and head away from the water, straight into the flames.

This last failure — not sounding the sirens — might have been prevented by an alert system from Genasys, a company based in San Diego. Part of the Genasys system includes speakers that actually speak. A loud, clear voice tells people what’s happening and what to do, whether it’s to evacuate a fire, head away from a tsunami, or shelter in place because of an active shooter.

“Using sirens that we were using in 1940 in 2023 is just insane,” says Genasys CEO Richard Danforth. I interviewed him for CNBC in Laguna Beach, California, a city prone to wildfires.

The city’s Emergency Operations Coordinator, Brendan Manning, says the municipality has spent $1.3 million on a Genasys system that includes an array of 24 speaker locations, each tower set-up costing between $50,000 to $150,000.

Laguna Beach successfully used the speakers during two separate fire evacuations last year. “While we have patrol vehicles and PD officers trying to go door to door knocking…it’s just another way for us to yell in backyards and say ‘Hey, pay attention. Something’s going on,’” Brendan tells me.

Genasys can provide pre-recorded messages that a first responder launches from a desktop or smart phone, but Brendan says his team has the ability to create very specific messages as needed. “What our lifeguards love about this is that they can record messages on the fly.” (I can’t find any incidents where the system has been hacked.)

Here’s the story I did for CNBC.

If the power goes out, the Genasys system has batteries, and some have solar power. If the communications network goes down, the speakers have a backup satellite channel. The speakers are now in several California communities, and Japan bought a thousand installations after the Fukushima disaster. Genasys has also sold the system to one U.S. auto plant and a couple of big sports venues, like Fenway Park.

Danforth, the CEO, is reluctant to criticize Hawaiian authorities (he probably wants their business), but he does believe that “better communications tools would have had a different outcome, for sure.”

Paradise covers up a lot of sins, but the tragedy in Lahaina has revealed a heartbreaking incompetence that cost over 100 lives.