For the Maui sirens, there’s actually an argument for not activating them. From my understanding, the sole purpose of the sirens is to warn residents of a tsunami. Residents are trained to run into the forest in the mountains when they hear the sirens… the exact spot where they needed to keep people away from because the fire was raging. If that’s accurate, it might have done more harm than good to use them. It also sounds like the mayor didn’t bother to answer a request for temporarily rerouting streams to let the fire department have enough water to respond. Because it wouldn’t be equitable to the other people on the island to let that small group have so much of the limited resource. I might be missing some details, but that’s what I got out of a quick news article yesterday. I’d apply the avoiding work argument here more than the sirens. First guy made a hard decision. Second guy sat on it until it didn’t matter anymore.

(Edited to fix a few words Siri felt should be changed after I typed them)