Maui County Sues Cell Phone Carriers For Lahaina Fire Outages
The county claims it sent text message alerts with evacuation information, but many of those texts were never received.
Maui County filed a lawsuit against four telecommunications giants Wednesday alleging that the companies failed to notify 911 dispatchers about a cell phone service blackout that hampered the government’s wildfire response in Lahaina’s hardest-hit neighborhoods last year.
Filed in Maui Circuit Court, the complaint against Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, Spectrum Mobile and AT&T alleges that the county sent at least 14 text messages to Maui residents and visitors containing evacuation information, but many of the alerts were never received because cell towers islandwide — including all 21 cell towers servicing Lahaina — were experiencing widespread outages.
Federal law requires cell carriers to immediately report service outages to county 911 operators, but that did not happen at the height of the government’s emergency response to the deadly Lahaina blaze on Aug. 8 and 9, according to a Maui County press release.
The county has also filed a complaint against Hawaiian Electric Co., saying the utility did not switch off the electricity during the Lahaina fire.
Meanwhile, the county is named as a defendant in multiple lawsuits criticizing its emergency response during the catastrophic August fires in Lahaina, Kula and Olinda.
The Lahaina blaze was the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century. It devoured most of Maui’s historic Lahaina town on Aug. 8, killing at least 101 people, displacing 13,000 survivors and causing an estimated $6 billion in property damage.
