State lawmakers are urging government agencies to improve communications with each other and the public during natural disasters.
Representatives from county, state and federal agencies met with the House Committee on Public Safety to discuss their response to the recent Kona low storms, and ways they can improve.
The Hawaiʻi Emergency Management Agency, National Weather Service, and City and County of Honolulu’s Department of Emergency Management were among the agencies at the meeting.
The discussion included talks of drones, radars and artificial intelligence to detect and analyze incoming disasters more accurately.
But one thing state lawmakers urged the agencies to do is improve “human-to-human” communications, such as when the public calls 911 for emergencies.
“There's low-tech things that can be done, human-to-human things that can be done,” Rep. Della Au Belatti said. “The high-tech is going to be more expensive. If we need immediate things to do now, let's get the immediate things also fixed. … We all have said that it's the people in Hawaiʻi that make the difference, but when the people in Hawaiʻi are calling the government and they face a roadblock, that is a problem.”
Belatti was referencing reports of residents on Oʻahu’s North Shore who said first responders were unavailable or unhelpful during the early hours of the storms — when flooding destroyed homes and land and stranded residents on rooftops.
Rep. Amy Perruso also promoted the agencies providing more public outreach to improve the resilience of communities during natural disasters. She said some of the community was taken by “surprise” during the storms.
“I feel like part of why things kind of fell apart in Kona 2 was that there wasn't that capacity, there wasn't that resilience,” she said, later suggesting that residents may need to be prepared for natural disasters more than they have been traditionally.
“In hurricane season, it's a season, right? I'm starting to think that (because of) climate change, we need to be capable of being resilient through a season of these kinds of events,” Perruso said.
The agency representatives did acknowledge that they can improve their handling of communications to the public, including announcements, sirens and even phone calls from the public.
They also told the committee that better equipment and software could help them predict the severity of a storm. They added that Hawaiʻi could use more emergency shelters and interagency agreements to manage streams, which can accumulate debris and stop the movement of water.
