Incentive to take no action

 The tragedy in the town of Lahaina on Maui, Hawaii, is still unfolding. But one constant comment from the people who wer ein the town when the fire hit was that there was no official warning.

That does not mean that there was negligence. Sometimes natural catastrophes evolve in a fashion that means the developing disaster only becomes "obvious" with hindsight.
 

On Maui, the second largest island in the Hawaiian archipelago, there are 80 outdoor sirens. These are tested monthly and are intended to warn residents of tsunamis and other natural disasters. Although there was a power failure overnight and the flames did not "suddenly" engulf the town until mid-afternoon, the sirens did not go off. For the moment, we don't know why not.

The stories of the people who survived follow a similar theme. Although it was clear that *something* was happening, it wasn't clear precisely what and it certainly wasn't obvious that fleeing the town would have been the right thing to do. That, indeed, could have been a matter of heading into danger rather than heading away from it. Then, when the conflagration arrived, it was with quite staggering speed and incredible heat.

Why the air temperature should have risen so dramatically, so quickly, I am not sure. But, as I realized when I heard the comment of a survivor whose family had been trying to drive away saying "when we saw the car next to us just burst into flames, we knew we had to head for the ocean", I realized that it was quite clearly an inferno rather than an ordinary fire. 

Put grimly, this is not something that you see often -- certainly not in the wildfires that regularly hit southern California these days. When it comes to identifying bodies it will be on a par with Hamburg during World War II. Teeth or DNA.

There is, however, another factor that might be at play here. I would estimate that about 95% of people are not the kind who are capable of making on-the-spot decisions -- not unless, as eventually happened in this case, a failure to do so will result in certain death.

People generally like to do two things. The first is to think about it, and the second is to consult other people to see what they think. The tendency of the vast majority of people to avoid personal responsibility (even in their own minds) is strong. Anyone who has tried to organize a group of six people into a restaurant trip will understand this. All too often a half-hour is spent with all six of those people trying to avoid being responsible for the final choice. After all, it might be a bad restaurant. If it is, they want to make sure that someone else can be held to be to blame.

Sadly, this strong desire to avoid decision-making for which one might be held to account in case it goes wrong has permeated into organizational culture. The larger an organization, the more layers that there are, the harder it is to get a decision made quickly and, if it does go wrong, to discover where the buck stops. It is hard to get a decision made quickly because, generally speaking, the risk-to-reward ratio in any organization militates against signing something off. If it goes right, no-one says anything. if it goes wrong, the person who does the signing-off gets the bollocking. There are a large number of people in organizations who are actually proud of their ability to pass any potential responsibility on to someone else's desk. 

Now that the tendency to make decisions slowly, on reflection, and preferably with someone else likely to take the blame if it goes wrong, are not only intrinsic to the nature of large organizations, but also secretly in sympathy with 95% of the people who work in that organization, it becomes easier to see that, when a disaster (like, say Grenfell) unfolds, with multiple failures on multiple layers, the one constant appears to be one of people choosing not to act rather than to act. Common sense would have shown that fire access to Grenfell Tower was nearly always blocked by parked vehicles, but not one of the thousands of people who would have seen this would have done anything about it. Why? Because there was no reward for so doing. Similarly, the whole sequence of events which seems to have led to dangerous cladding being put up on the outsides of hundreds of blocks of flats looks to me to have been the result of everyone involved shifting the responsibility to someone else's desk.

We live in a society of risk avoidance. This, indeed, is praised. "Caution", "precaution" "safety", and so on are hooray words.  But no-one seems to spot that, when "caution" is deployed on an individual level ("if this goes wrong I am going to make sure that my arse is covered") it can lead to far greater danger on a societal level. Indeed, I would posit that society's entire approach to "safety" is flawed. But I know that nothing can be done about it, because I have been in too many groups of six early on a Saturday evening when five of the people are saying "I'll go with the majority". They think that this makes them look "easy-going". In fact, it makes them look like "blame duckers".