House Standing Committee on Public Safety

Good afternoon. Convening the Committee on Public Safety. Today is Thursday, September 11, 2025, 1:30pm in Conference Room 309 of the Hawaii State Capitol. I want to thank our invitees for attending this informational briefing before the Hawaii House Committee on Public Safety. My name is Della Belatti.

I'm of the Committee and I'd like to offer my colleagues an opportunity to introduce themselves.

Kim Cocoo Iwamoto, representative from District 25.

Hello. Thanks for being here. Representative Garner Shimizu, District 32 so for.

Members of the public who are joining us, the purpose of this information informational briefing is for the City and County of Honolulu Department of Emergency Management to provide the Committee with an overview of its hazard mitigation plan, the mitigation planning process and after action reports regarding recent tsunami and w wildfire threats on the island of Oahu, and how lessons learned from these recent events will inform future emergency management responses, including but not limited to communication and evacuation plans.

This briefing is partly a continuation of briefings that have happened before this Committee on August 28, when we heard from State Hyma Director James Barros, from the State Department of Transportation Director Ed sniffin, and from Dr. Collins counterpart on the island of Hawaii, Director Magno.

And so we really wanted to hear from the city and County of Honolulu. This is Emergency Preparedness National Preparedness Month. So it's really important that we have these kinds of conversations publicly to follow up on things that we're learning as a community.

So with that, I want to turn this over to Dr. Collins, who is again the Director of the Department of Emergency Management, who is new to our community and we so welcome him and his expertise and his team here. Dr. Collins, thank you, ma'.

Am. It's a pleasure to be with you on this 24th anniversary of September 11th as well as National Preparedness Month to talk about these very important topics and the things that we've learned and just ensuring that we have a growth mindset about emergency management and how to make our community safer.

And so to kick off this discussion, I first brought my hazard mitigation officer, Ian Keough, who was instrumental in putting together this hazard mitigation plan that we're going to brief you on. And he did yeoman's work.

It's a very large plan and a very large project to do one of these things, which is why FEMA only requires it every five years. But we got this one pushed through thanks to his hard work.

And I'm going to allow Ian to present the hazard mitigation plan and then after that I'll cover the Maili fire and the tsunami. So with that, over to Ian.

Thank you. Can you hear me? Great. Ian Keogh, Hazard Mitigation Staff Officer with the City and County of Honolulu Department of Emergency Management. You can continue I guess to the slide. The next one, that's me.

And then the next one is kind of the overview and kind of give you a purpose and overview of the hazard mitigation plan. Ideally, five years is quite the time frame to get this done, but the planning goes into about a year and a half prior to that five year deadline.

So I'm going to give an overview of what that looks like, define hazard mitigation is a big one also and identify how to use the plan and understand the risk and the hazards that do pose to our island and also identify the benefits of these actions and kind of give you an easy way to read the plan because it is very, very large.

And I'll continue with next slide. What this plan sometimes gets confused for is an operations plan. So I'm here to say that that is not what the plan is. Ideally when we're, we have operations plans for when disasters do hit us.

This is the, this is a plan for those blue sky days in between those disasters so we can become more resilient as an island technically. And if you do not have the URL for that, it is on our city emergency management website.

If you do not have the URL, we can provide that to you by the end of, the end of this briefing. Okay. And so what is hazard mitigation? It's anything that is going to actually reduce or eliminate long term risk to people, saving lives and also to property.

Those are the two mission critical dynamics that we have here in our Department. And there's two buckets even that fits into with MAS mitigation. One bucket is called capacity building. That's where we're doing studies and seeing if it's feasible to do a project or not or to build up a capacity to respond to that.

And the second one are probably what we more think of are the shovel ready projects. You know, as an example, capacity building to do a study of where we should put a tsunami wall, whether it's Waimanalo or Waikiki.

And then the shovel ready project would actually be building that tsunami wall so we can save as many lives as possible and also protect the property in that area. And the purpose of it, you know, is we're assessing risk, I'd say at a very basic level.

And the difference between this plan and the one from five years ago. The one from five years ago was very technical engineering speak. So it's not that it wasn't hazard mitigation based, but probably didn't do as good of a job as probably this one as assessing the risk from the island.

And if you were lost somewhere in downtown Honolulu and you called me looking for directions, the first question I would ask is, where are you standing right now in order to get you to where I am in that way. And that's exactly kind of the overview and the purpose of this.

And it's not just we get the plan approved and adopted, forget about it for five years, and then we'll come back to it. This is a living document that we get to update on a yearly basis. Next one. And this is the wheel of planning. How's that better? The semi wheel of planning, I should say.

We started with getting a core team together, subject matter experts, city stakeholders, to kind of get through what are the risks and the analysis of it. And really, as we're drafting this, these are drafts over and over and over again. We need that working group for that. Above that is the steering group Committee, which was their supervisors.

So if things were missing or things weren't hit or deadlines weren't hit, we could always reach out to the steering Committee for that. And then we're looking at the planning team and then the working group, of course. And then we had a consultant, Tetra Tech, help us with that side of it.

They had a series of experts on the East Coast to help us out with the drafting and the direction really of the plan in case we were going the wrong way.

And then obviously the public participation, we did a series of, I guess you could call them town halls or public open forums where we would get feedback from the public. And that is not again, a static participation from the public that is continuous.

As on our website, we also have a link that they can actually fill out for that survey over the next five years so we can make that plan a little bit better as we go through continuing. All right.

And as the requirements for this planning, assessing risk are the two big ones from that risk, we look at the strategy of what we're going to do against those hazards and disasters. So those are really the two biggest parts of the plan.

In the thousand page document with all of the exhibits and the appendices, if you really just focused on the risk, the hazard risk ranking and then the mitigation strategy, those two chapters will give you everything you need to know about the Heart of the plan.

The rest of it is very informative to build up to how we got to that level from that. Again, plan update and plan maintenance. We'll do that yearly, not just every five years. And this plan has to be formally adopted by the mayor's office and also approved by FEMA.

Both of those things have happened as late as early as July of this year. And the plan expires July 12035 years from now. Next slide. Okay, and then the differences between the last two, like I said that the 2021 read a little more technical. And in 2023, the State of Hawaii revamped their own hazard mitigation plan.

And what we decided to do is really align and mirror it with the state's plan. That would get priorities in line. And the state has designed that agency, the Emergency Management Agency, to really champion us and also be a good resource for any pushback we get at the federal level.

So we figured by aligning with the state plan, the priorities would look the same and then they'd be more familiar with the verbiage and terminology as we're doing our own mitigation projects over the next few years. So we expanded the scope of the hazards a little bit. There are 15 of them.

Some are natural disasters, some are technological, man made, like cyber terrorism. Everything that's happened in the past five years up to including, I think we can all agree with COVID there is a health section in that plan that we've taken data from those past five years to really see where we are from a risk standpoint.

And we are addressing any health risks as well in the plan. And then the plan also had kind of progress that we've made on the last plan's actions, which were about 57 of them. We revamped about half of them to be in the new plan.

About, I guess about 10% of those 1015% of them were already completed. And then there were about maybe, I don't know3035% of them that were, I guess, not really pertinent to what we were doing in 2025. So we decided to really take this from the ground up and revamp the whole plan.

It wasn't just editing the old one in a lot of ways.

Ian, what is this? What is this showing?

So that is. I apologize if it looks like Connect 4, but the. We decided to upload them by chapter so when you go in, you don't have to upload and wait for a thousand page document. You could go to the specific chapters in that plan. Good question.

All right, so having utilized the plan, the two big ones that I'm going to, as I mentioned, are going to be the hazard ranking and then the mitigation strategy. But there's a couple things in between that that you can definitely do a deep dive into based on your own interest or just curiosity.

I'm new to the island myself since November and these profiles were developing. These profiles were enormous with the research I had to do just to learn about what I was walking into on the island. So, next slide. I know it's probably very small, but there are.

These are all of the hazards and their profiles as we rank them. Natural hazards, you know, as we just dodged a bullet with the recent hurricane coming through, is a good example of that.

And then there are human caused hazards that we're looking at, whether it could be, as I mentioned, cyber terrorism or maybe even a human caused bioweapon, things of that nature. So there is one for each disaster and hazard that we have. They are informational only.

So if you're looking for tactics on how to deal with them, I would say that is not what's going to be inside of those. Each hazard profile is going to be organized by the next slide. It's going to show the location of where historically they've hit, the extent, how much disaster it could do when it does hit.

Any previous occurrences we've had, the data goes back to 1819, so we're talking 200 years of data.

Now we're going to look at also calculate the probability of whether it could happen in the future and then assessing the risk is that, you know, tsunami is yes, a big wave that hits the island, but it also causes flooding and debris problems. So what other cascading events could happen from a disaster? How vulnerable are we?

There are vulnerable populations on this island. We included that in with the assessment as well. Are we prepared at the city to address that and handle that and prevent lives from being lost and property from being damaged and then any future changes that may affect the risk? This is how we're going to get into the strategy part.

It's one thing to outline it in an informational profile, it's a second thing to come up and devise a plan to take care of it going forward. And that's really what we do with the plan. And the big one that we look at at the city level are lifelines. You're talking, what does this affect?

How does this affect the power grid? How does it affect the drinkable water that we have on the island? How does this affect first responders to get to people who need search and rescue things of that nature?

So when we look at the city during a disaster, we're trying to keep all of the communications and energy and the water and the things that make us a unity as a functioning city together to prevent them from being damaged too badly and definitely, you know, not destroyed, depending on how big the disaster is.

And then the next slide, this is where I was focusing on the hazard ranking. We did high, medium and low, red, orange, yellow.

Not saying that the orange and yellow are not as important as the red ones, but when we did our calculations almost to like Rain man goodwill hunting territory with the mathematical formulas we had, we assessed that the six biggest ones were going to be climate change and sea level rise, which affects a lot of other things that happen to us.

Floods, health risks, hurricane, tsunami and wildfire. And if I can be honest, only since November that I've been here, I have been activated for four of those six. I've had a couple of flood activations at the city level. I've had a couple wildfire activations at the city level.

We just had the tsunami one I think everybody is familiar with, and then also the hurricane one that we just dodged recently. We hope knock on something that we don't have any health risk like we did five years ago.

And again, as we're partnering with the Office of Climate Change to deal with the sea level rise issue, that does affect us all here living on an island. But this actually checked out in an operational standpoint. It wasn't just things that we threw together because they sounded like they posed the most risk. The data showed it.

And then also. So at least the anecdotal evidence of just over the past nine to 10 months shows that we've had these as well. So this is the big chapter. If you can read the hazard risk ranking chapter, that's a good start.

And then I'll get into the rest, which was a better finish to get through the plan. Now here's the mitigation actions part of. Again, we don't want to just give an information document and plan.

We want to show kind of strategies to develop and what we did to develop and prevent these disasters from really wreaking havoc on our island. So next slide, the big three goals. With our mitigation strategy, we wanted to encourage resilient infrastructure citywide.

You know, if there's a lack of generators that could be affecting the power grid, we want to address that in the plan. As an example, we want to protect People and property. That's our mission critical statement at the city level. We want that to reflect in the plan as well.

And then we want to promote really internal and external collaboration with this program.

And we did a lot of that, not just with the public, but also one of my goals when I first got here was to really do some outreach to our subject matter experts that may not have had the chance to comment on the last plan from five years ago.

So that could have been University of Hawaii Members, it could have been have been people from the National Weather Service. It could have been our partners in HWMO for wildfires, as well as all the city stakeholders with facilities and maintenance, design and construction, and also Department of Transportation.

These are critical stakeholders that do form what we could say. I don't have those dynamics and expertise in those areas, but they do. So the outreach to them was very important to get in this plan complete. Next slide.

And if you're looking at this, this is really an outline of all of the hazards that we identified in the risk profile. And then also how many actions roughly among them, some multiple and then some standalone that we took care of to I guess address from a standpoint, a macro standpoint.

The two biggest one we had or flood and wildfire. Flood. There are 33 different actions out of the 45 that we have that deal with flood, some standalone, some multiple, and then wild and fire. 25 of those actions deal with something to do with wildfire.

It could be anything from wildfire, making communities more resilient with their firewise plans. Anything.

It could be also doing street elevation projects potentially to affect some of the flooding that we're going to getting, that we've been getting in the Waikiki area and all the way down to, you know, we're looking at infrastructure, dam failure, invasive species, tsunami and hurricanes as well, which are some of the bigger ones that we have here.

So going through that, you'll find in the mitigation strategy chapter, there are actions that address all of them, some more than others, because we've ranked them higher on the risk profile. Next slide. And when we're looking at examples of these actions, we're thinking in three dynamics, short, medium and long term.

So the short term, you know, we're going to be doing, you know, in one to two years, education and outreach. We do a lot of preparedness items on in the city as well. Mitigation is a little bit more enhanced on the preparedness side just because we're making them more resilient.

We're not just Educating them to get out of the water when they see it dripped away 150ft. With a tsunami coming, medium term actions, two to five years. This could be anything from coastal flood maps to develop to firewise plans to get people in communities more resilient.

I think we're about halfway there where we want to be on the fire side, according to hwmo. So we want to address that at least in the plan. And then long term actions, these are items that are shovel projects that are going to take a while and we're promoting nature based solutions with this.

That was a FEMA initiative for quite a few years, still focusing on that. But as you can see the hazards that we'd be focusing on. The long term tsunami wall doesn't go up overnight. So that does take a while to do for a lot of reasons. Street elevation projects, again, not an overnight project.

That's going to take a while. Not just for the funding, but also the planning and the permitting and all the other ones that you're looking at like hurricane and wildfire. These are again the highest ranked ones, which is why they probably take so long sometimes to mitigate against.

And then the final wrap up of this is the maintenance. Again, I didn't want to make this a plan where we are static, sitting here after five years and then we forget about it until 2030. This is.

I've worked with the Office of Climate Change to actually develop a maintenance plan that would have at least yearly updates to the plan, if there are any, with public feedback and our stakeholder feedback, but also have kind of touch points, maybe even quarterly to every six months or so from the departments themselves, kind of progress reports to see where they are on these certain projects.

We figure we'll give them the first year or so to get this up and running as they're getting used to this. And then from that point on there will be something that is a little more immediate on those touch points.

And then once we get to if it's mid-2030 when this plan expires, you're talking January 2029 is really when the next cycle for the working group and the planning group will get together to update this plan.

With the progress I think we've made so far and the connections that we've made so far inside the city and out, I think this will be a much smoother process than it had been over these previous 18 months.

I got in at month 10 of the 18 month process and it was like Tasmanian devil time to get this done by July. So I appreciate everybody's support on that.

And then that wraps up the mitigation side. We look at community actions, at least on the preparedness side of what you can do to help us and help you as well if a disaster does hit that next slide.

And it could be anything from making a plan with your family, with your loved ones on the island, gathering emergency supplies early. We've seen what happens when things go awry and you're in line getting gas or supply supplies up to Costco, determine the flood risk for your property and home.

I know our Department of Planning and Permitting has their own GIS map where you can literally put your address in and see if you are in a flood or tsunami zone. So that will help with the planning as well and being proactive and retrofitting your home big during wind events and storm events.

But the one that I think we don't think about but should be kind of the foundation for any plan should be the insurance side. And I don't say this humorously, I say this seriously, is that the time to buy fire insurance is not when you're standing in front of your house and it's burning down.

It should be long before that into some sort of risk plan and risk assessment. The purpose of insurance is to pool resources to mitigate against a disaster that is too expensive to afford on your own when it does happen.

And having that in mind to mitigate against any catastrophic disaster, I think is something I said should be the foundation of any plan. So these are the things that we educate the community on a monthly, weekly, quarterly basis.

And the last slide for me is that again, if you don't have the URL for the plan, inside that URL is also a link to a public survey. Having read if it's just part of the plan you're interested in or the whole thing, either one.

We always welcome feedback because this is feedback that we are going to we store on our internal database and then we update when we convene with the planning Committee once a year to put it into the actual hazard mitigation plan update.

So the first one they're looking to do believe they've scheduled, probably it's going to be late summer, early fall, 2026, when we do get that back and do convene again in order to update the plan. And with that, that ends my briefing in case there are any questions. Happy to answer them.

We have a number, I have a number of questions on the mitigation planning, but why don't we go to your after action and then we can take up all the Questions?

Okay, great. Yes. I didn't know if you wanted to kind of split it up or move right into the briefings about the fire and the tsunami. So on the next slide, on July 6, we had the Maili Fire. It stretched through three days of activity in the area of where the fire was.

And before I even get started, you know, we've called it the after action report. But just please know that after action activities are still ongoing and industry standard for the most part. Usually you do an after action review and it can take 90 days.

And especially like with the tsunami, which is more recent and much larger in complexity. You know, I even know that some of our planning meetings to or after action meetings with the state aren't even scheduled until October. So we're still kind of combing through all the data and that sort of thing.

These are some kind of initial findings, if you will. So next slide, please. First and foremost, with the Maili fire, I would tell you that the actions of that day were centered in what we would call a bias for action, initiative and teamwork.

And what I mean by that is at all levels, we saw our responders respond in such a manner where they knew things had to get done. They took that initiative and they worked together to complete these activities. And as an example, we have this photograph here which was taken at the scene.

And those are police officers holding a fire hose over the fence line so that we could get water into the area for the firefighters to do their fire suppression activities. So these police officers, they don't just write tickets, they're out there and they saw an activity that needed to be done to help the overall response efforts.

And these are some of the same police officers that also arrived on scene before the fire Department saw that the, the direction of the brush fire and that there were homes in danger or homes in the pathway of the fire and assumed correctly that those homes were occupied.

And they took the initiative to self evacuate, or not self evacuate to initiate an evacuation. So they went door to door, knocking on those doors, getting the people out of harm's way. And that was without any firefighter saying, zero, it's going to get bad.

And without any firefighter telling them or directing them to do such an activation, they recognize the risk themselves and put themselves at risk to save the lives. And so that's just the repetitive theme that we saw also with the bias for action, initiative and teamwork was the call for the evacuation.

So as firefighters arrived on scene and they recognized through their experience and training the fire behavior and what could happen, they initiated a process to, to get alerts out to the community, to tell the rest of the community that was still at risk to evacuate as well.

And so they, working in concert with my staff duty officer, initiated the evacuation order, pushing the button to initiate the wireless emergency alert, which rings all phones in a particular in the defined area that we set on a map.

And, and that staff duty officer, without waiting for direction from me or from the deputy, initiated that wireless emergency alert, realizing that lives were at stake. And so, and much to, you know, it gives me pride that they recognize those types of decisions and know that time is of the essence and make those decisions.

So with that on the next slide, you'll see that we have a short timeline. Again, these are various. This is at a much larger scale, more strategic look at the timeline. But at 2:33, we've gotten a call from a 911 call, called in the fire, and the resources were dispatched.

And then after that, HPD identified risk to life and commenced those evacuations that I was talking about. Right upon arriving on scene at 2:42, right behind them a few minutes, HFD arrives on scene and starts to establish their incident command and their fire suppression activities.

At 2:50, the Police Department expanded the evacuation area, realizing that the fire activity was going to go well beyond what was originally thought might have happened. At 2:56 is when fire communications contacted the Department of Emergency Management. And shortly after that, our Emergency operations center, we initiated the activation of that.

And then at 3:12, the Department of Emergency Management was requested to issue that evacuation alert. And then at 3:23, the EOC evacuation activation notification to the EOC partners went out. And then shortly after that, our EAS and wireless emergency alert was issued. And so then at 3:39, the initial HNL alert was issued to all HNL alert users.

And then at 4:27, the critical patient, the one victim of the fire, she was transported to the hospital.

So, you know, I think if you look at that timeline, though, from the minute that or from the time that the evacuation alert was requested to the actual wireless emergency alert being done, it's a very short timeline on a weekend, people off duty, getting them getting their computer out, getting the grid coordinates and everything that has to be communicated for an evacuation alert, that happened very quickly, I think it was 21 minutes.

And so if you think about what could happen in 21 minutes, a lot of times if they're trying to get a hold of me, I might be swimming laps in a pool or doing my boxing or something. And you might not get somebody for an hour or so.

The way that everybody acted and reacted to the emergency information that was coming out was with a great deal of urgency. If we go to the next slide, please. So these are the identified areas for improvement with some recommended actions in terms of alert and warning.

One of the things that we really believe that is will help fill a vulnerability within the Department of Emergency Management is an established 24.7watch office at the JTMC. The JTMC is the Joint Traffic Management center where our 911 operators are right now. DEM is not represented in that. In that building and it's police and fire dispatch largely.

But so where we see this vulnerability is that if we establish a 247 watch office that will continue to monitor the various systems that we have for alert and detection and then be available at all times for issuing those wireless emergency alerts, we cut down on the time and we'll cut down on the risk of not being available.

Also under alert and warning is to train all field incident commanders in alert and warning protocols. We lost some minutes, if you will, in the transmission between the incident commander to the fire communication center to the DEM staff officer. And then so there had to be a back and forth a little bit more.

So if we streamline the request process and have what we call a nine line report, knowing which line contains which information, we can more effectively communicate the required data and then make it simpler, reducing errors.

In that phone game exercise that we seem to have under incident management, we want to see us utilizing a incident management team a little bit more proactively. We have the Honolulu incident management team where the tactical operations are being handled by the fire Department.

But they get so busy focused on the flames and the mitigating actions that they have to take that some of the more larger strategic things like where do we put shelters and who's providing logistics and different things like that.

We want to make sure that we can keep focus on the tactical operations and then also focus on those more strategic multi agency coordination actions by utilizing a incident management team. And so that was a lesson learned there that we wanted to do and actually took. Have already kind of taken actions to implement that.

And we saw that on the Kunea fire a few weeks later. In regards to situational awareness, we want to integrate AI and modern technologies to support situational awareness and a common operating picture.

We want to be able to have early warning detection and utilize AI in such a manner that it provides all the things that our first responders need at the scene and all the things that we need in emergency management within our emergency operations center to help make decisions, to help identify when and where evacuation zones need to be established, to help support the operations as needed.

And so we really want to focus on that technology integration into our operations under communications, improve protocols and tools for real time transfer of information and resource requests from field to eoc.

Again, one of those problems with communicating from the field to our staff duty officer about where the evacuation area was was because of the complex roads that were in the particular area and similar named roads and that sort of thing.

And so we much rather have a system where we can just draw on a map in the field and it's seen in the emergency operations center and then makes that conversation a whole lot simpler to understand where the areas of concern are and then disaster recovery, establish a program that evaluates victim needs and aid in recovery.

What we saw after the fact was in terms of debris management and the burden on the community in terms of the cost to put things in the landfill and other community needs that might have gone unnoticed or unprovided for.

And so I think the lesson here is that we need to keep an eye on what those community needs are and identify what we can do as a government entity, as the city and County of Honolulu to free up those the resources or loosen, you know, either by proclamation of an emergency or other means, make things easier on the victims to recover quickly.

If we go to the next slide, we have those departments that agencies and departments and organizations that supported us during this particular operation, as you can see is quite extensive number of organizations that have to be coordinated and supported. And so we really thank all of the organizations for coming to the table that day.

And then on the next slide we have a public alert and warning timeline, a breakdown of what that looked like and a snapshot of some of the messages there.

But 3:12 the HFD notifies dem that evacuation was required at 3:32 emergency alert to all Oahu radio and TV stations went out and the wireless emergency alert sent to all cell phones within the area.

And then we followed that up with text and email alerts to cities mass notifications system using the HNL alert system that we had recently implemented and have been promoting since its go live date. And then one thing that we did notice immediately on our alert was that we had a link for the evacuation area. It was not.

I even tried to click on it before I headed out to the emergency operations center. It didn't work. And so we made immediate correction and got an evacuation map Sent out with that correction at 354. On the next slide, you'll see a little bit about our alerting system and how they kind of work.

Again, you know, for all things, not necessarily emergency alerts specifically, we really encourage people to sign up for HNL alertsnlalert.gov and there you'll get all kinds of information, non emergency alerts. And then also we would encourage everyone to follow the Department of Emergency Management on all our social media platforms.

But specifically when it comes to emergency alerting, we not only use the H and L alert system, but primarily we're going to use a system called ipaws, which facilitates a wireless emergency alert. And that wireless emergency alert goes to everyone's cell phone.

We've all, I'm sure you know, you heard them quite a few times on the night of the tsunami, which we'll talk about in a minute. But it allows us to geolocate a particular area.

In this case, we targeted the evacuation area, so therefore not unnecessarily alerting other people outside of that area and causing alarm and that sort of thing. So with the WEA or the wireless emergency alert, again, it will ring all phones within a targeted area. And then that also trips what we call the emergency alert system.

That's what's going out on radio and TV and communicating in that way. And then we also have access, obviously, to the outdoor warning sirens.

Again, warning sirens not solely intended for tsunami, maybe as previously advertised in years gone by, but we're definitely marketing them these days more as an all, all hazards alerting notification, outdoor warning notification, so that we can get people's attention.

And the intent there is get your attention, find your phone, find some media, and understand the other actions that we may want you to take. So just become more informed. Because obviously the sirens only alert you. They don't give you any instruction.

So on the next slide, in the conclusion of the MAILI fire, I would just say that this was a major incident that was moving fast.

Very thankful for the bias of action, the initiative, and the teamwork of all parties to alert everyone involved, alert the people that were in harm's way, get them moved out, and then really facilitating support to HFD and their efforts to contain the fire and extinguish the fire over the several days that they worked on that.

I think if you were in the emergency operations center, you would notice that there was open communications.

We had great partnerships at work where even HPD was putting up their drone footage or putting their drone into the air to support Both HFD and the EOC to be able to see a bird's eye view of what was happening on the ground.

That improved our shared information and allowed us to make the decisions that we needed that needed to be made. So again, all the different organizations working together, that's certainly the way that you want to manage a crisis, is that teamwork effort, and that's how we serve Oahu.

And then just moving on into the tsunami warning and with the next slide. In similar vein, I would say that the tsunami was a very fast and frequent communication event. You know, things happened really fast from the beginning where we had the tsunami watch to moving right into the tsunami warning.

A lot of traded information back and forth with Honolulu and the state and the other counties as well, participating in all of that effective leadership. Here in this picture, you see the mayor right at my side the entire time during, throughout the entire event. And you can barely see his phone there in his lap.

But I guarantee you, if you blew it up, you could see that, you know, he's on his texting and, you know, if one of the two things is happening, he was either texting the Governor or if you spun the camera around and saw what we were looking at, we were on a conference call with the state, Hyema and the Governor.

And so there was just open communication across the board between state and the counties, and us being obviously the example there. And so we had that effective leadership right from the top of the Governor, from Mayor Blanciardi here in Honolulu.

And then we have just the teamwork across all city agencies working together to get people to safety and we can move to the next one. And I know there's a lot of concern and we'll talk about some of those areas that we learned. But, you know, from my standpoint, it was mission accomplished. You know, people were inconvenienced.

But at the end of the day, you know, before impact, we had people in areas of safety, and we, you know, had there been worse damage, I'm fairly certain that we had all the people, at the very least, that wanted to be in safe areas, in safe areas. And so with that, I call that mission accomplished.

It's sometimes very complicated and very chaotic, and certainly at the timing of where this one happened, it didn't help matters any. But that being said, we were able to work collectively across government sectors to get the people to safety, upward and inward, as we said that evening.

So we have another timeline here at 1:25, the earthquake happened off the coast of Kamchatka, Russia. And that kind of initiated the whole event. At 1:31, the tsunami watch was issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning center. And then at 132 we initiated the activation of our emergency operations Center.

So luckily we had people in the office at the time. And so we were able to, you know, push that button rather quickly on this one. And then at 1:37 we sent out our first HNL alert regarding the tsunami watch. And then at 2:43, the tsunami warning was issued by PTWC.

And then at 2:47, the HNL alert regarding the tsunami warning began the evacuation. So that was the first time that we started messaging evacuations as early as 2:47. At 3:22 is when the emergency alert system in Wea was issued.

And the reason for that delay was there was actually a conference call going on between pt, PTWC and the state and all the counties. And so we were discussing the actions and coordinating those events between us. And then at 4:103 hours before, per the protocol, we started issuing the siren. Siren sirens are activated.

Those were activated by HYIMA at the state on all three accounts. And then at, and then. But all through that, during that time is when the evacuation was occurring. 710 was the anticipated first impacts to Hawaii, with I think 717 being the anticipated first impacts to Honolulu. Obviously minimal impacts were recorded.

And then at 10:39pm the tsunami warning was canceled and the weather service issued the tsunami advisory. And then 1051 HNL alert was sent out regarding the tsunami cancellation. And then we concluded our operations at approximately midnight.

If we go to the next slide, again, you're seeing the improvement area and recommended actions with regards to alert and warning weas needed to be issued by Dem, not hyima, with local information. We that evening decided that HYIMA was going to issue all the different, different wireless emergency alerts for the entire state.

But there's, I think, upon reflection, a lot of local information that really needs to be focused on at an island level. And so I think we're going to be issuing our own wireless emergency alerts in future events regarding public information. Improved coordination with state on the press briefings.

There was many times where the state was doing a press briefing and we were trying to get on the air to share information about the gridlock or actions to take to minimize the gridlock or other actions to take about that people needed to plan for, get information out about our transportation systems, get information about, you know, at a certain point we shut down EMS operations in tsunami inundation areas and that sort of thing.

And so wanted to get that out. But competing with the state on who was on air at what time was a challenge. And so we would like to see that coordination improved in the future. Also, with regards to our public information, we did not have an American Sign Language interpreter during our press briefings.

And that's something that we would like to improve on in the future, to focus on reaching out to that community and then also in public information, social media platforms to reach younger populations. Being on TV is great and it helps to get the word out. So are the cell phone alerts.

Cell phone alerts are very limited in how much information you can communicate. And one thing that we recognize is the younger generations aren't watching the TV, they're on social media.

And so if we can go live on LinkedIn, if we can go live on Facebook, if we can go live in Twitter, and we can go live on TikTok then, and YouTube and others, then you have a dedicated, dedicated TV studio right from your phone, even.

But, you know, obviously we want to do things a little bit more professional than that, but it's an uninterrupted source of streaming information, and we don't have to coordinate around the state or anybody else trying to share airtime for that.

And so we think that that would be another window to get information out to the public, especially those younger generations that use those platforms more so than traditional media.

And then with regards to incident management, obviously the traffic flow and gridlock that occurred is not something that we want to see and we want to be able to do that better. We had a great meeting with all the interested stakeholders on that last week, and still a lot of analysis to be done.

Unfortunately, we don't get to choose the time and place of these tsunami warnings. And so coming out during rush hour time frame, I mean, we already know that traffic is bad during that time. And so to dump everybody out of the beach areas during rush hour is going to only amplify that.

But we definitely want to be able to do a lot more analysis in this area and understand what our options might be, whether they be phased evacuations from high populated areas, whether it be some other mechanism that allows us to minimize the impact on the ground, on the street, to keep things flowing better is something that we want to do.

And also with that, I'll jump to the last one there, vertical evacuation. We think that is going to significantly help as well. I don't think we took advantage of that as much and pushed that lesson as much as we could have.

But keeping people in place and just going up in our high rise buildings above the fourth floor that might have helped alleviate some of the traffic congestion as well. And then the last one, you know, moving back up one again, the tsunami zone and the extreme tsunami zone, we learned that that was quite confusing for our public.

And so we have a red area on our maps and a yellow area on our maps. And our signage out in the roads are map to the yellow area. And so the yellow area is designed for a very rare chance of a very large 9.5, I think, earthquake out of the Aleutian Islands.

And so there's only one really scenario where we might use that. And all the other times are the red area or just the normal tsunami zone. But it was very confusing. And so we're going to have to improve the way that we message that and we go to the next one. There we go.

So again, you know, I would just say that, you know, very happy that we were able to move people from the hazard area, the inundation area, the evacuation area into safe areas and feel that we had a very successful operation in that regard.

Lots to learn, lots to improve on, lots that we want to study and understand how we can do better in the future.

But at the end of the day, very proud of all of the responding agencies, Department of Transportation, EMS and Fire and Police, but also the VOADs that help us, Red Cross and then the interaction that we have with HYIMA and the state agencies, DOT and doe, all helping to support this very large and very short timed operation.

So, and very unexpected operation. So glad that we were able to pull all of that off. And with that I will conclude my briefing and entertain your questions.

Thank you. So we got really three buckets of information here. The mitigation, hazard planning process, that's a longer term effort. We had an after action report on the recent July wildfires in Maili and then an after action report on the tsunami. Want to open up to questions to my colleagues first or I can dive in?

I have something to say. Thank you, Chair. Regarding the Maili fire, was the access road opened up in that situation? Was there.

An access road?

No, I, my recollection is there, there was no access road there that was going to provide any level of benefit to anything in, in that particular area.

But given what we've learned from the line of fires, do we have to be concerned with any of that kind of access road situation where communities can be locked into a high risk area because there's only one ingress and egress? Is that a concern in our communities?

Well, obviously it's a community by community concern. And also when it comes time for these types of fires, and that's some of the challenge with wildland fire. You don't know which way the wind is blowing. You don't know where the point of origin of the fire is and where that fire is going to go.

So it's hard to prearrange some of these things or to be able to say you have to go this way because on Wednesday it might be go this way, but on Thursday it might be go that way.

But definitely, if you know, if you're in a community that there's one way in and one way out and there is a private access road that does allow for an egress that is not normally open to the public during normal days, then we definitely want to take advantage of that.

And I know of, I believe seven that my organization works with the access road owners to develop memorandums of understanding to make sure that those procedures are in place to do those. But it does also become very complicated in terms of, I know one of those, there's four different owners of the access road.

And so that's, you know, four different people that have to be involved in the MOU. If there's gates up and things like that, there's four different types of opening instructions and then getting the right people to their, you know, so it becomes very, what seemingly might be very simple becomes very complicated pretty quickly.

So I think my advice to the public especially that lives in a particular area, know your area and know what's, you know, if you are in a one way in one way out, you may just have to, you know, get out the one way that I mean, there's no other option to go out to an access road.

If there is an access road, that's where you need to, number one, be clued into what those plans are and work with all the stakeholders that are involved. Reach out to our office, we can tell you what the procedures are and that sort of thing.

But you're still going to be listening to the evacuation orders and we're going to be articulating, you know, we need you to go south, we need you to go northwest or whatever based on the information we're getting from the fire Department as to what, what the situation is and what the fire is doing.

Can I build off of that? So, you know, the question's being asked like, what does this have to do with mitigation hazard planning? And in your plan from 2020, I was really diving into this and focusing on the areas where there was actually no progress done.

And there were four areas, four strategy areas that there was no progress done. One of them was road resilience, which actually speaks exactly to this point of egress and ingress for communities and their own being only one. And so, and I'm going to just read straight from the plan.

What was the plan previously or what was the mitigation strategy previously was to relocate or locally defend, reinforce vital infrastructure such as roads in coastal eroding regions, improve the materials and construction practices of roadways for greater resiliency. Now DTS is the lead on that.

And there was the action review was that there was no progress made between 2020 and 2025. You folks have carried that forward in the 2025 plan, acknowledging that most main highways are state highways.

So it's not to put it all on you, it's to say that it's partly us, but you've included it in the 2025 mitigation hazard planning. So what are you going to do to make sure that that gets pulled forward? And so that in the next report we don't see no progress, but we see progress made.

The big discussions I had partially with DTS Transportation, the other one was DFM, which is facilities and maintenance. They're the ones that are tasked with fixing any roads that end up eroded during a. We're looking at a big event like a hurricane where we have washed out roads.

So we'll do something called in kind repairs to get ambulances and first responders through kind of in the short term. And then some of those longer term ones are going to be completely redoing the roads. And you can see how long those projects take.

This is part of part and parcel our ideas behind doing that yearly update to the plan. As I mentioned, we're probably going to be doing quarterly or maybe every six months touch points. Those will be more geared towards progress reports.

And that way every quarter or every six months we can kind of grade it on a zero to five scale. That was one of my ideas that I put forward that okay, where Are we on the progress?

And if we're seeing zeros and ones and zeros and ones, we're not getting closer to the fives, which is where we want to be. So you can't improve on anything unless you measure it, in my opinion.

So I believe the best path forward is probably to set something up that would have routine measurement to see if we're actually getting towards those goals. Good question.

And then with. Just to follow up. So what is. So the kind of the trifecta of agencies you have to mobilize is DFM, DTS, and then the state as well.

Well, so this is, I'm getting into the weeds here, if you're okay with that. So you're okay. Yeah, the, the, the FEMA mitigation guidance that we get, they're very particular about legal responsibility. And if that road is county responsibility, then we have at least some purview over that.

If it's state responsibility, or H1 as an example, or H3. I hate to say it, but they sometimes stop right where that road starts, if it's not under their purview, and just say, that's somebody else's problem. FEMA will not reimburse something that we can't legally, we don't have legal jurisdiction over.

So that local road washout where we were looking at north of the island, north of Kaneohe, where usually I think it's Kamehameha highway, that has just too much exposure to the shoreline.

And if something did, if we had this Category four storm hit us where it was supposed to and tracked to, that would have, that is a road that could have been washed out and inaccessible for months.

I hate to even think about that just on that end, but we have more flexibility when we're local, when the roads are locally damaged, just we don't have control over which ones do get damaged if they get stateside.

Representative I think it's also important to understand that when we do these hazard mitigation plans, it's often done in a vacuum, outside of a funding mechanism. We identify areas of things that can hopefully prevent and or lessen the effects of any of these particular hazards.

And I think at the end, we have about, what, 23 projects or $23 million identified in projects, but that is done outside of our budgetary process. And also, as you kind of indicated, there's multiple entities responsible for some of those areas.

So some of that might be DEM's responsibility, some of that might be DTS's responsibility, some of that might be DOT's response depends on the hazard, and those are just three example agencies. But sometimes we're able to get hazard mitigation grant funds that can do some of those projects, and sometimes those are match requirements.

Sometimes, you know, we can ask for money in our budgetary process and take ownership of those without grant funds, federal grant funds, and that sort of thing.

So I think, you know, we really strive to identify where we can make efforts, and then we come up on after the plan's done and try to find the funding for them in any way, shape or form that we can to really make the effective change that we want to see.

I think the point, though, is that if you folks are looking at the threats and then you're collaborating with the state and various agencies in the compilation of this. This planet plan, it opens up at least it's. It paves the pathway for opening up those sources of revenues when the. When the.

When they become available and everybody's prepared to maybe make the request that they.

Need to make 100%. Absolutely.

I'm done with my set of questions for this part, but any other questions for this?

I had a question regarding wildfire. Is that. Okay, go ahead. You know, I know wildfires are red and just being preventative. I have constituents in my district that live adjacent to, let's say, military projects or military property that have dry vegetation that's not maintained. I guess the question is how do we address that?

Or who would be the appropriate person to, you know, arrange that fire break or maintain that?

Yeah, well, certainly, you know, if you can identify who that owner is, if it's one of our military partners, then certainly address that information or that concern to that base, that base commander, and share that with them.

If you're not sure who it is or if you don't think it's being taken seriously or whatever the case may be, we always act as a coordinating entity, and so we maintain relationships with those base commands. And so you can certainly contact DEM and we will, you know, raise that concern also with the.

With the base commander and see what we can do about mitigating some of those risks.

Okay, so your contact information will be provided. Zero, sure. Yeah.

Since we're on wildfires, can I follow up on something on one of the wildfire slides? And this just popped out at me in the presentation on slide 26. I'm just curious. Integrate AI and modern technologies to support situational awareness in the context of wildfires. I'm very interested in what that means. What is the integration of AI?

Yeah, well, this particular one in. I have a particular interest, particular history of use of AI before coming here. And so I want to bring that kind of technology integration into the overall program. So there's several different projects that I'm interested in.

And the one that's listed here, it's actually a rip off of a project that's happening in California called FIRUS and Fire Intelligence Risk. Apologize, I'm going to miss the acronym now.

But just to kind of clarify what FIRUS is, it started in Orange County in Southern California and quickly grew to Orange County and LA County and what happens upon immediate notification of a fire. And they have a system very similar to our Alert west that picks up smoke and or flame that alerts us.

They immediately put fixed wing aircraft into the air and it starts circling the fire.

That camera is outfitted with specialized analytic information that brings the data that it's pulling in from its lens in and beams it down to at this point, LA County fires watch office, who then puts that information down to San Diego in one of the universities there through a supercomputer.

Then that data is beamed immediately back to the first responder on the ground, giving them all kinds of fire behavior analysis as well as what the aircraft is seeing. So allows for a much greater amount of situational awareness.

That was the program then, and then shortly thereafter was adopted statewide by Cal oes and now that they've not only used that for fires, but have used that for a train derailment and an oil spill. So it's really having gone through a proof of concept and expanded into an all hazards version of itself.

And so I have a very keen interest in understanding what that might look like for Hawaii as well as can we do it without the fixed wing and can we do it with drone technology? So that would be an area that I'm looking at trying to integrate such a program.

So this is interesting because I believe HECO or Hei, I forget what they are now, but they are engaged in tHeir own wildfire planning process and making sure that they have policies and procedures in place. And my understanding is that some of the wildfires that.

Or the fires, not wildfires, the fires that have been picked up recently have relied upon the cameras from Hico and larger landowners. So are you having conversations with them about this kind of AI technology that could help if they're. And can you speak to any of that?

Because again, I think it's really important as we have these large landowners who can take more responsibility and they are showing a willingness to do what they need to do, obviously, because they also have to protect their own interests. Have you engaged that kind of community to do this kind of project?

I think the camera system that you're referring to is the AlertWest system, and that's the one that is largely he and provided in that manner, and only until I've only been on the ground here for four months. So the answer is no, I haven't had that conversation with them. I have identified some funding.

We got Homeland security funding issued August 1st and then that was identified, but it won't be available for another six to nine months. So. But planning and discussions have started with many partners with regards to program. I've talked to HFD about it. Now there's a.

We're trying to establish some agreements with an AI emergency management startup company called EM1 and also a long list of partners like Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization, et cetera. That.

So we're really starting to build the coalition now and those conversations will be ongoing until we can get a plan in place and then really seek to utilize the funding as well.

I just encourage that because I think there are a lot of community groups that are working on this and if you can engage with them as they go through their planning process and it's a public planning process, I believe. You know, just make sure that we're all kind of doing the Kako thing right. We're doing it together.

I will say one last thing on the wildfires before we leave and go to the other areas in the plan. And this is something maybe now we can do because we have a state fire marshal.

But in the plan, I was a little bit disturbed when I saw that it says in the Risk Assessment and Methodology and Tools chapter that for wildland fire, quantitative data regarding wildland fire was not available. So that's disturbing to me. And can you speak to that? And maybe that's a function because HFD wasn't taking responsibility for that.

State Fire Council, maybe not doing that. But what. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, just acknowledging gaps in data on how we probably measured it. The methodology went through four buckets and that was property, the economy, people that it could affect. And whether we have the ability or capability or adaptability here at the local level to mitigate against that. I can't speak specifically to that.

I'd have to read through it again in the data. But I know we identified gaps in certain hazards and that was one of them. And I think when you. When you have those gaps, when you figure out that formula, that's the Reason why wildfire ends up in the red as one of our high priorities.

Had it ended up as a low priority with those gaps, I would have been a little more concerned with our methods. But the fact that it wasn't then, that's front and center of what we want to take care of here at the city.

Okay, so I guess, I mean to speak a little bit more to that then. So what do we need to do? What is the quantitative data you needed? When I read this, I was thinking like, do we not know how many fires we have on a yearly basis? Like that kind of basic information that we're missing?

We don't have that.

Our big nexus to understanding this was hwmo, the, the wildfire management organization. Their tools that they gave us to when they were, I guess, reviewing as a subject matter expert. 98% of the fires that are on the island are man made.

And with that then it becomes, okay, what do we do to educate the community to not do those things? There are communities that we separated into, I want to say on Oahu, there's eight separate communities and I think half of them do have firewise plans through the hwmo.

And one of our mitigation actions that we wanted to do to tackle that was make sure that all eight of them had those firewise plans for preventative measures at that point. The other side to it is what do we need is a very good question. Part of the mitigation actions and strategy is capacity building.

And one of the actions that we had put in there was a wildland fire survey which we're partnering with CCSR to tackle for those very things. Because if it's, I'm a teacher by heart and if someone is unaware of something, then it's our duty to educate them.

And if we get that survey data back to see where the current community stands with their knowledge of risks with wildfires or lack of knowledge, then we can tackle it from that angle. Particular, 98% is a significant number and I think we have to start at the heart of it, which is education, outreach.

Okay, 98% is what data point again is man made.

It's not like a hurricane that comes in as far as that's concerned.

So just commenting on the firewise communities. One of my communities, Papukulea, is a firewise or community is beginning, is going to be certified or whatever that is becoming a firewise community. You say that there's eight island wide.

Eight, I want to say they're divided into regions. When I looked at the data we Divided them into regions and I think three or four of them had that certification. And the goal with this plan is how do we get it to 8? 100%.

Okay, so 8 is the entire. Would cover the entire island. Correct. So again for the public and for the Committee, my district is very urban, but Papukolia sits at that place that's that wild urban interface.

I think it would be good for us to know if it's three or four communities that are really active, what are the communities that aren't. And do we need to help put resources towards those communities that are not moving towards Firewise?

Because also in your mitigation plan is that each community, the response is different from community to community. We've just invested some monies into the state agencies to help these kinds of things to move forward.

But it would be helpful to know what are the communities that need or are not, you know, and we don't need to, we don't need to out them right now, but maybe, maybe that's information that we should share and then work with our communities to make sure that we're alerting them to those needs.

Yeah, priority number one A as far as DEM is concerned with CCSR and they've been very helpful. Two points on the mitigation plan that allow us to get access to funding for these types of things.

You mentioned the land that isn't well kept and maintained property acquisition is one of the bullet points that FEMA allows for reimbursement on funding and a mitigation plan. And if we can acquire properties that are not maintained and mitigate them towards preventing of fires, that's one avenue which we did put in the plan.

The second dynamic is that we're identifying and kind of narrowing down the city owned properties that are not maintained. So we have control over that to help mitigate against wildfire as well. So yeah, I think that's why when you saw that slide with how many actions were geared towards wildfire?

I think 33 of them were because of that. We looked at the high risk profile of that and wanted to make sure that was taken care of. Thank you for the feedback Chair.

Thank you. As you mentioned, Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization and the Firewise certification for certain communities. It's interesting because I have just been in contact with them and trying to get information how to do that for my neighborhood. And I think as you mentioned that there are three or four Firewise certified communities.

It would be helpful to connect us and learn how they did that. The steps that's required because When I read their checklist, one of the things I saw was, and maybe I misunderstood it is that we have to go to every house, every resident in whatever community, and do an assessment for every house.

And that seems pretty major to do that. You know, I mean, I can see if you live in like a high rise and you know, you have such a, a uniform situation, you can check off boxes pretty easily.

But when you have such diversity in a neighborhood, to go to every home, single family home, and do an assessment is kind of difficult, I think. Yeah.

And you said connection, meaning connecting yourself with the hwmo, or is it your.

Community or neighborhood, whatever method. I mean, just to get public knowledge out there, whether it's leaders, just I guess, broadening the information access. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

I just wanted to follow up with RIP Shimizu and maybe it's more of a comment to him and something I've been noticing as a property owner.

So I noticed that when I renewing insurance or getting new insurance, insurance companies are not asking me to take pictures all around the property, which I've never been asked that before because I think what they're looking for is am I stacking up combustible stuff against my house, you know, or the fence line, am I going to.

Am I what am I planting combustible plants like too close to something? I think they're also catching on. So I think this house by house kind of assessment might already be happening from the insurance, might be putting that pressure on us as property owners to look at when we're ready. I do have a question about hurricane.

Yes, actually I think we can shift now because I have questions on the tsunami and the communications, but let's go ahead. Okay.

Hurricane. So, you know, I follow or read and listen. Watch Dr. Keone Dudley's warnings about how few hurricane level 5 hurricane resistant structures we have and are we really moving?

Is our risk of being hit by a level five hurricane, is that risk rising given some of the changes in our environment and, and what are we doing to address that? My district is Kakaako.

There's a lot of high rises and I actually think that the hallways and some of these cement structures, the internal hallways are going to be kind of safe compared to the single wall construction homes in other parts of the island, you know, so yeah, I think it's going to obviously affect different communities differently.

And so how are we addressing that?

Yes, ma'. Am. So you've just hit, you know, my nightmare scenario for sure, when Category 4, Category 5 hurricane with the housing situation that we have is, is a very big concern for me. Is there risk? Of course there's risk.

Obviously you see the opportunities for it to, for the hurricanes to be that big are lower than smaller hurricanes or tropical storms or whatever. But that being said, it's still a risk. And you also asked, is that risk rising?

I think it's really hard to articulate its rising because, you know, when we talk about climate change, the change is so slow. So you know, even the course over the course of 2040 years, it's hard to measure or anything like that. But that being said, for me as an emergency manager, it's largely irrelevant.

The risk is still there. And so the focus there is. When I look at what we have gamed out, when I look at, we have a simulation software that kind of tells us what we can expect based on the scenario that you kind of input into it called Hazus.

And On a Category 4 hurricane we can expect 240,000 damaged structure structures, 86 of which are single walled residential. And so then that leaves us with a 160,000 person sheltering situation. So that there's just, and there's no mechanism to provide for that. So that is, you know, a terrible situation.

And you know, what are we doing about that? Unfortunately, these single walled homes that have existed for, you know, generations now, you know, what we look for is upgraded building codes and want everybody to comply to upgraded building codes.

Of course it's all attrition though, as you either make changes to a building or as you take a building down and put a new one up. That's how we improve it.

But there's, you know, there's obviously no mandate that we're going to require these people that can barely afford to stay in some of these homes to make changes to their homes and that sort of thing. So it's a wicked problem that we have in emergency management.

It's one that keeps me up at night and I hope we can really find the funding and find the solutions for such problems.

Okay, thank you.

I guess I'll follow up on that because I think that we need to know what, we need more specifics about what are we doing or what can we do if we're not going to build out these level 5 resistant structures?

And if this is a problem that you're really worried about, what is the city doing in the event that we could have a hurricane? Four, level four.

And well, so I think building codes are there, so I think we're up, you know, updated building codes, but you have to Build for the building codes too. So the existing structures aren't going to be updated to those building codes.

So the real question is, what are we going to do, you know, to mandate that homes be upgraded?

Can I just say, for instance, anyone who has friends or family living in a condominium that's concrete, I would say say a hurricane of that magnitude is coming, try to go stay with them, you know, so at least there's concrete structure around you.

Yes, ma'. Am.

I mean, tell people something when that time comes.

Zero, absolutely. That's what our guidance is. And we absolutely call the shelters that we open, which are not hurricane rated, as shelters of last refuge. And so our guidance is to have your personal preparedness plan go to. Have you go to work where it might be a better structure.

Find that family friend that lives in a structure that is rated for a higher storm rating or is up to date building codes and that sort of thing. Don't stay in your single walled home. Don't. Only do you know, only in your last resort should we be seeing you at the shelters of last refuge.

So that's in our guidance. Absolutely.

So do we know which buildings, even if they're slightly older buildings like some of the schools in our neighborhood, you know, some of them might be safer during a hurricane than your single wall construction home. But how does the public know which buildings those are? And should we know in advance which ones should we go to? Right?

You know, I mean, like, have a plan. Well, I don't even know. I mean, we don't.

Why don't I help you with this? Okay. In your, in your plan, in your mitigation plan, in 23, in Chapter 23 mitigation strategy, and actually, this is actually a pet peeve of mine. You had four again in 2020, you had four areas that no progress was made on.

One of those areas is hazard mitigation incentives create incentives for homeowners and businesses to retrofit their buildings. I am actually relieved that you've carried this forward. So one of, I think your answers should be, and could be that you guys are looking at evaluating programs, policies and incentives to promote residential and private sector retrofits.

Like that is something that you guys can do now. That's something that the city can do. That's something that we can ask council Members to Fund. I mean, is that a response to Rep. Iwamoto's question? And this is in your plan, you're saying you're including it in the 2025 plan?

Yes, ma'. Am. I don't Know if I'm being misunderstood or if I'm misspeaking, but absolutely, I am the biggest proponent of updated building codes. That's what I'm saying we need to do.

But I'm saying that that is a very long term rate of attrition solution because it costs so much money to, you know, to update people's homes and that sort of thing and it's personally owned. So do we encourage that 100%. We encourage that.

I want every, every building on the, on the island to be built to the current building codes, not to something that's 40 years old or older kind of thing. So that I absolutely want what, you know, exactly what you're saying. We message that as much as we can.

And the building code standards right now are higher than what we see though. You know, when you drive around the island and you see these single walled homes, you know, those aren't up to current building codes, but they were up to the codes that they were built to.

And only when they bring in, you know, zero, I want to put an addition onto my home and they have to come in and file with DPP and, and that sort of thing do is a mandate to update that home to a higher standard does that happen. And so that doesn't happen often.

So I think we're not disagreeing, I think because I think we all agree that better and adherence to better land use codes or the codes are better.

Yes.

But knowing that we're not going to get some of our single family home or single, single wallet homes up to that code. The question is what are the other things we are doing? I think that was part of Rep. Iwamoto's questions. What are the other things that the city's planning for and doing?

Like if we mandated companies or even schools that during a hurricane, four or five, and if you're in a single wall construction home, come here. Yes. You know, and like where we let everyone know.

And then also if in fact these condos in my district can, if we can commit to bringing in X amount of individuals, neighbors from the community, then we should kind of identify that and say if we have two hours before the hurricane hits and you guys can drive here to our building, please come here and take shelter.

I mean, I don't know, there has to be a plan thing in advance and then maybe we give a tax credit if they participate in this kind of idea. Something, something where I mean, I think just being a good neighbor, I mean just knowing how many people you can shelter during an emergency and saying Please come.

Like everyone does it. So it's not like all the pressure's on one building.

Can I add to that? I think what I'm getting from Rep. Iwamoto and I agree with the point is like if we're sick or we have a medical injury, we go to a hospital. We know that the hospital is where we go to.

And at this point I think it would be important to identify whether it's through analysis, but identifying what structures are safe for category three, category four, whatever.

And we have identified through analysis and identification where are safe places that people that are in a single family home that is not safe, but at least their lives will be protected so they know where to evacuate to.

And those kinds of communications and just government overreach of overarching, I guess, care for the community Members, of letting them know this is what you should do. Short of you having a Category 5 structure that was built for whatever building code which nobody else has, but everybody else that doesn't have that, this is where you could go.

You should go. And having that kind of analysis and coordination I think would go a long way in the short term versus, you know, in the long term. Yeah, eventually everybody will be built out like Guam, you know, for hurricane resistance.

But short of that place, we need to instruct people where to go to be safe, to save lives. Does that make sense? Is that what you're getting at?

And is that built into your process, into your EOCs that you guys would initiate in the event that there's a hurricane or barreling down towards us?

So, yes. So our messaging before long before we're activating the eoc. I mean today our messaging is have a personal plan. No, you know, again, last place of last refuge is our shelters because we do not have a single shelter that's rated for more than a category one. That's the situation that we're in on Oahu.

And this is why I said it keeps me up at night. So we do regular assessments on our shelters, knowing which ones have air conditioning, which ones have generators, which ones have these various things. But we have no means at this point to do any type of island wide retrofit of these of these facilities.

Most of these facilities are Department of Education facilities. And so we certainly don't have the budget, nor do we have the statutory authority because they're not. Many of them are not ours. City, County of Honolulu. So do I want them upfitted, outfitted and sturdier? Absolutely. I will sleep better at night with that.

Can I chime In a little later. Yeah. Just because the difference between kind of what we were talking about when we got the slides up that the mitigation is kind of that five year long term look. It's not an operations plan. What the sheltering and even debris removal and feeding and housing.

If we have to get to that point, those are more operations plans. When we feel pretty good, confident of the path of the storm and who's going to get impacted. Which side of the island. It's the whole island. It's the whole island. Kiko was a very good test run for us.

We start the planning as soon as that hits 140 because that's in our base in the central Pacific. And I did not feel comfortable with the track of that storm until about 48 hours prior to when it was supposed to hit. And supposed to hit was straight through Hawaii. Kai.

It was, you know, if the big island broke it up, great thankful for them. And while they do. But once, 48 hours prior to the storm arriving, it was obvious that it wasn't going to hit us. Had it kept that same original path.

That's where our operations plans would kick in for identifying the shelters and where to go. And we can't go too far out because we could tell Waimanalo that they're about to get hit and then it ends up somewhere else. You know, it's.

I don't want to say it's last minute or just in time, but it's not five days out and definitely not 12 hours out. We want to make sure that we implement those operations plans when we feel comfortable where it's going to hit and who's going to be affected.

So it falls under, quote, the operational plan as far as this communication, Is that what you're saying?

Correct? Yeah, it's everything from we have a planning chief in our operations center. We have an operations chief, we have a PIO. All of those three individuals work together with setting up shelters, which side of the island they're on, and then also communicating out to the public.

So those have specific triggers depending on where the storm and how intense the storm is going to be.

So should those information in the operational plan, as you state, be public knowledge, especially to leaders like us who field questions. What are we supposed to do?

I will defer to Director Collins.

So again, our guidance is to not seek shelter at these, these places of refuge that we, we activate because we know that they are not safe in a, in these hurricanes that we're talking about.

And the category of hurricanes that we're talking about, our guidance is to, you know, find shelter within your network, your, your work, your family, your friends. That should be your personal preparedness plan.

We activate the places of refuge as a last resort for those that have not been able to do that because we know that the facilities that we have access to are not rated for the hurricanes that we're talking about right now.

So you're saying that it's up to every individual to be an engineer and find out where is safer to go to than their single family, single wall construction home? Is that what you're saying?

I'm saying that we warn people not to stay in their single walled homes.

Right.

And to go to a safer place.

And where is that safer place? Where, where's the safer place? The city experts who are tasked with all of this. Are you going to defer that to individual?

Are you wanting DEM to provide a map that talks about the storm rating of every building on the island? Yeah, that would be great.

Okay. I mean, that's better than saying, just find your own place and be safe and good luck to you.

Right? Yeah, I mean, that's, that's pretty much what you're saying. Because, I mean, how would I know? I mean, you're saying none of the schools or your refuge sites are even category one rated. Who rates it? And how would I, So could I go to my building and say, hey, what hurricane rating are we?

I mean, the structure, just in case so we can make it through the night. Not is there a backup generator that's going to last for, you know, not that there's sewage, backup sewage. I just want to survive the one night or the 124 hour period.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I find that answer very unacceptable. Very unacceptable. I'm sorry that we disagree with that.

But I would think that your Department that is tasked with emergency response and mitigation and having all the resources beyond the General public, who is just layperson, is relying on at least some advisement and protection better than what you just shared.

As that said, okay, we don't have any shelter rating, so you're on your own to find a safe place. That's basically what you're saying, Sir, I'm.

Not saying that I disagree with you. I'm saying that DEM does not hold the plans, or we're not DPP, we're DEM. So plans are filed at DPP, the building codes and all that is not a DEM responsibility.

Would I be open to a project that would allow, you know, the passing of data so that we can create any type of database or something like that? 100%. I would love to see something like that. But as it stands right now, you're asking me what our situation is, and I'm telling you what.

We don't have those plans. We don't have that data. In many cases, things are filed by paper, you know, so we don't have the infrastructure that, to wit, you're talking about right now. So.

Okay, let me help you out. And I think maybe this is where my understanding, right, and this is going between operational plans and what you just know generally, right, when a threat is bearing down on our community, a very real threat, and then your EOC gets activated.

Certainly in that situation, you're going to have access to folks from the schools, from the state. Then you will be giving better advice as to where people should go beyond just the personal planning that we all want individuals to take responsibility of. I think that's the question.

In those instances, you can't give us a specific thing to do right now because the context is not clear. But I think what we want reassurance of as the policymakers on this side, because we often get legislation. From our. Constituents asking and demanding that you guys have all these plans in place. That was actual legislation this year.

You know, we have agencies like you then who come forward and say, no, we don't want to do that. Well, then who's supposed to do it? But, you know, you're the Department of Emergency Management, and we're looking to you for guidance. That's why. That's where the frustration is coming from.

So maybe we're talking past each other at the moment. But I think that the thing is, is that our whole point is we want to make sure that the community is prepared and we want to hear answers from you folks to be like, not just you're on your own.

I more than anyone want to make sure that our community is prepared. That's what I am charged with. What I would ask of you representatives is that you enable my Department of 15 people with a $2 million budget to be able to do that.

And to do that I need more resources and I need more access to these types of things. I'm not going to be able to do these kinds of activities with that level of organizational structure. Okay, that answer sounds more plausible.

Thank you.

I have some questions, but I'm very mindful of the time that we should probably wrap up.

I was very interested, Director, on your comments about the communications and how you folks are kind of having interference with the state and that possibly moving forward you want to make sure and you think that it's going to be more county driven communications. Can you speak a little bit to that?

Sure. So what we're talking about is, and I was specifically mentioning in that comment, I believe the wireless emergency alerts, where we allowed them, the state Haima to initiate all of the wireless emergency alerts. And wireless emergency alerts are very limited in characters in our short message. I believe it's 90 characters for those that have older phones.

So the message is very limited in what you can communicate. And so by initiating our own wireless emergency alerts, we can put more county specific information about the actions that we want rather than more broad, statewide generic information.

So our focus would be a little bit more tactical, if you will, a little bit more detailed and more specific to the information that Oahu residents need. And I would believe that the other counties would want to do the same. The statewide information was just very generic. They were.

In one case, I even remember one of the transcripts saying the sirens are going to go off. Well, okay, you know, it's fine. We don't want to alert, you know, we don't want to scare people.

But the whole point is to give instructions as to what we want, you know, move away, move upward and inward, those types of things.

And so, you know, if we're going to give even more specific information based on location or we're trying to help clear out the congestion of the traffic or whatever, then we're going to have to provide more specific information rather than statewide information, if that makes sense.

So that process where you folks want to take more control of the wireless messaging.

How is that going to unroll because I will say in both the instances of the wildfires and the tsunamis, I was alerted first by text and my phone just like shook. And it was like I found that actually the. Initially the best kind of communication to receive initially. But so.

Yeah.

So if the counties are going to be taking over and if that's going to be one of your recommendations, that the counties have more specific messaging going out, how is that going to work between the county and the state? Will that slow down the messaging or how does that.

No, not at all. And. Well, you know, I don't know that the state will need to do as many messaging. And I think we still have a lot more conversations to have with Haima. Maybe they'll do the first one and then after that release the counties to issue their own alerts because, you know, they.

We could actually move forward today and we could send 25 of our own alerts and the state could send 25 of their own alerts. We don't want to do alerting fatigue, though, so we definitely want to coordinate that a little bit better. But the point is that there's no limit on what we send.

So, you know, but working closer with the state and understanding what the overall needs are with while still getting the specific information that is needed to the people that is relevant, because there's going to be Kauai things that are relevant to the people on Kauai versus the things, you know, the people in Oahu.

So the fact that we can isolate or geolocate those messages and send out the needed information is what the focus is. So I shouldn't say that, you know, we're going to take over and then state's not going to be able to send anything. That's not the case. The state can still, you know, send their messages out, too.

It's an ongoing conversation for more coordination moving forward. Okay, I have one last question that's really simple, but any last questions from colleagues?

I got two questions and hopefully they're very easy. One is again, making sure we get your contact information. Yeah. And then secondly is, I know you said this is not an operational plan, and I just wanted a brief explanation of what's the difference between this plan and the operational plan.

Sure. So this is again the title of it the local hazard mitigation plan. So it identifies projects that we can do to prevent or lessen the effects of these particular hazards. So the fact that we can cut back vegetation reduces the possibility of fires coming out.

If we can put in a flood wall or Something that helps contain flood waters into a stream. That's something that you obviously want to do. That's a mitigation action that you want to do. A operational plan is a plan that we trigger when the hazard actually happens.

So when we have a fire, we know that the fire department's going to come and they're going to do firefighter things by putting the fire out where you know that the police are going to come and they're going to close roads and evacuate areas and that sort of thing.

We know that EMS is going to come and treat patients. We know that we're going to call upon the Red Cross and activate shelters for the people that are activated. Those activities are listed in an operational plan.

So is that operational plan accessible by us?

I'm happy to share it with you. It is not listed. It's not like posted on our website or anything like that. But it is. But I'm happy to provide that to you. Okay.

Yeah, thank you.

Last question, I think. And then we'll have closing remarks by our presenters for the mitigation hazard plan. In the process, you're supposed to have an annual meeting to review it. So when can we anticipate the annual meeting for this? You just had it approved in July.

So can we tell the public, like, as we move forward, to expect a plan review in July 2026 between 12.

And 15 months from the adoption? So we haven't set that date yet, but it's going to be July, August, September 2026 in that realm.

And again, you know, we have a lot of people interested in the public in all of these things. So, you know, I was first alerted to this plan because of a social media post that you guys put out asking for people to participate in the process. And so I think, you know, keeping that.

I did not know about this mitigation plan before that, but clearly this is a roadmap for the things that we need to do to prepare. So I appreciate that you folks are doing the community outreach and I urge you to continue to do that.

Thank you.

On that note, I'm going to allow our presenters to give some closing remarks and then we'll conclude.

Yeah, real quick. Thank you for the opportunity to at least brief out on this. I never shy away from discussing this. This has been something that I've had my head in the Ayes bucket for since November.

It was a real, I should say, milestone to get it approved and adopted and I'm very happy to see the interest in it. So thank you for the time and opportunity.

Been a pleasure as well and really enjoyed the opportunity to explain some of the things that we've been working on. I know that. Well, I'll tell you this, like I said before, I would love to see the level of preparedness on Oahu grow exponentially. And I'm certainly wanting to do that. I'm certainly approaching that with my team.

And I believe that Mayor Blangiardi brought me on with the idea of change based on everything that he's shared with me about my recruitment process and that sort of thing is that he wants a new approach and new on emergency preparedness.

And so I'm really optimistic at what that means in the future as I proceed through our budgeting processes. I'm really excited about the Homeland Security grants that we got. We got 370% increase in our Homeland Security grants for our urban Area Security Initiative.

But that being said, I'm always looking for other ways to grow our Department and grow our budget so that we can do these types of activities that, that you're mentioning and many more that are certainly on my radar screen. But what I've come to also find out is that this is a very complicated environment.

Everything between civil service versus procurement rules that take forever and that sort of thing all complicate getting to the end state that I'd like to see.

And so anything that you all can do to help streamline emergency preparedness in terms of reducing the bureaucracy of things that we have to do for emergency preparedness, I would love to see that. So. But it's been a pleasure and would look forward to more opportunities to present to you.

Thank you. Dr. Collins, any closing statements?

No, I want to thank you. I know we had our intense conversations, but I appreciate what you've done, coming in 10 months out of 18 and doing what you did. Thank you very much. You know, I'm from the private sector, I'm a freshman Legislator and I'm beginning to understand a lot more the intricacies of the bureaucracy.

So I can understand that. I would hope that the important concern that we had that was expressed by Rep. Iwomoto and myself might be out of your scope, might be out of your capacity at this point because of budget constraints and staffing.

But if that is what is flagged as far as analysis and what can't be done currently, I think it should be really flagged and shot up the line to explore this and see what the obstacles are and what are the action steps that could be considered and not just say, oh, we can't do that.

You know what I'm saying? I think that would be very appreciated. Thank you.

Thank you. I just want to reiterate my thanks and I would share that on the funding. You know, communicating those funding needs to the council clearly seems to be something that needs to be really important to do.

We're always, you know, people always come to the state, but, like, this should be something that is flagged for the council, not just. Not just for the state, especially because, you know, it's this, the people, the residents of the city in kind of Honolulu that we have to worry about.

And so I urge you to say the same things that you said to us to the council Members, but thank you very much. I think from our perspective as the state, this gives us, again, another insight into how very different we have to approach each of our counties. And so how we can work with you.

We will certainly urge our state departments, you know, Haima, DOT are there standing ready to work. This is a collaborative environment, and we look forward to the work that will be done by all of our agencies.

So on that note, I do want to thank you folks for being here on this, on this day in National Preparedness Month. And look forward. I will say also that I'm glad that Kiko averted and that there was a lot of good messaging about how to be prepared that was coming out. So appreciate that.

On that note, I think we will conclude and adjourn this meeting. Thank you.

Thank you.