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Who’s to Blame for Lahaina? The Titanic has the answer.
There is no one scapegoat.
When I visited the Titanic Museum in Belfast, I learned a great deal about the sinking of the Titanic. Of course, the movies seemed to point to a ship’s captain that ignored warnings and literally plowed ahead into an iceberg. That was the simple answer — blame the Captain, who did go down with the ship and lives in infamy to many.
However, the causes of the disaster, much like the causes and responsibility for the destruction in Lahaina, stem from a series of errors in judgment and the confluence of many of these factors all coming together at the same time.
There were at least ten causes for the Titanic to sink to the bottom of the ocean, despite the fact that it was deemed unsinkable. I learned this on the tour of the museum; however, for those who don’t have the opportunity to pop over to Northern Ireland, here is what NBC chronicled: “No one thing sent the Titanic to the bottom of the North Atlantic,” Richard Corfield writes in a Physics World retrospective on the disaster that caused 1,514 deaths on April 14–15, 1912. “Rather, the ship was ensnared by a perfect storm of circumstances that conspired her to her doom. Such a chain is familiar to those who study disasters — it is called an ‘event cascade.’”
