Under every government failure, there is usually a long list of officials that never should have had their jobs, to begin with.
That proved true during and after Hurricane Katrina slammed into Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005, with the devastation in New Orleans becoming a national scandal. Now, the aftermath of the horrific fire in Maui, Hawaii, is following the same frustrating path.
CBS News reported that Herman Andaya was the chief of emergency operations in the area. He had no prior experience with emergency management.
CBS News has learned Maui’s emergency operations chief had no background in disaster response. It’s his department that is responsible for setting off warning sirens, which rang silent during the fires. #maui #wildfires #Lahaina #MauiFire
— Norah O’Donnell 🇺🇸 (@NorahODonnell) August 16, 2023
Andaya made the final decision not to sound the emergency sirens. This system was touted before as being the best in the world. They used cell phone notifications, not realizing that some people, such as children, might have been unable to hear them.
What is Andaya’s history? He had a liberal arts diploma and was the chief of staff to a small-time politician.
He is a political scientist and a lawyer but has never received formal training in disaster response or preparedness. Prior to his current position, he had never worked in emergency management full-time.
His main qualification was his position as chief of staff for then-Mayor Alan Arakawa. Civil Beat Tuesday reported that he was a part of emergency operations in this role. He said that he has participated in FEMA workshops and online training over the years.
Maui Now reported that Andaya won the 2017 job over 40 other candidates.
It seems impossible that Andaya could have legitimately beaten out 40 applicants despite his complete lack of experience. This seems to be yet another example of political favoritism, where friends are put in positions of authority instead of those who can do a great job. The claim that he “took online FEMA training” is pretty meaningless. I’ve taken online FEMA training. Online training doesn’t prepare you for a major disaster.
Andaya is not the only one who has raised eyebrows. The police chief of Maui, who was the commander of the Las Vegas Strip during the mass shooting in 2017, also served as the police chief on Maui.
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier has repeatedly urged “patience, prayer and perseverance” while teams laboriously search for scores of remains in the ashes of the seaside community Lahaina of the victims of the deadliest U.S. forest fire in over 100 years.
He has delivered similar messages in the wake of other tragedies, including the 2017 Las Vegas shootings that left 58 people dead and hundreds of others injured.
I don’t think Pelletier was directly responsible for what happened. There were mistakes that were made, and he was ultimately responsible for them, but perfection is not a goal law enforcement can achieve. It is still striking that someone can go from being the person in charge of such a failure to basically becoming a police chief in a different city.
In the next few weeks, we will likely see more examples of this kind in relation to the Maui Fire just like it happened with Hurricane Katrina. People are often promoted to positions of authority based on their connections, not their merits. This can have deadly consequences, directly or indirectly.
