White Paper Series · Island Security Policy Institute · 2026
FEMA's NIMS/ICS assumes continental mass-casualty conditions: mutual aid, redundant infrastructure, and reachable resupply within 72 hours. The Lahaina wildfire — 100 deaths, $5.5 billion in damages — documented what happens when this framework is applied to island environments. This paper provides the island-specific alternative.
Practitioner-led island emergency management framework documenting five structural failures in the Lahaina wildfire response and providing an alternative framework replacing continental FEMA assumptions with island-reality design. This research is produced under the ISPI Research Methodology Guide v4.0 — five pillars: government agency sources, regional organizations, OSINT/Bellingcat two-source verification, the ISPI Global Expert Panel of 78 members across 14 disciplines, and AI synthesis under practitioner review. All ISPI research is free under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
Warning system architecture designed for continental tsunami response failed catastrophically when applied to island wildfire under high-wind drought conditions in Lahaina
Single-road evacuation routes on Maui trapped residents — a constraint with no analog in continental emergency planning
The 72-hour self-sufficiency standard is structurally inadequate for island communities where maritime resupply is weather-dependent — a 30-day reserve standard is documented
Biketawa Declaration invocation (May 11, 2026) for Pacific energy supply chain crisis validates this framework's supply chain singularity thesis at regional scale — 18 Pacific nations simultaneously affected by the same single-point supply vulnerability.
Pulley, Warren. "Island Emergency Management: A Practitioner Framework." Island Security Policy Institute, 2026. https://ispiglobal.com/papers-landing/wp03-island-emergency-management.html