I can’t help thinking that this is an instruction for our age.

It comes from an Instapundit post in relation to the Hawaii wildfires of two weeks ago, for which the mistakes of local government I wrote about here.

But in this case the post title refers specifically to an incident where two cars ignored the police roadblock at the burning village of Lahaina, Hawaii:

As flames tore through a West Maui neighborhood, car after car of fleeing residents headed for the only paved road out of town in a desperate race for safety. And car after car was turned back toward the rapidly spreading wildfire by a barricade blocking access to Highway 30. One family swerved around the barricade and was safe in a nearby town 48 minutes later, another drove their four-wheel-drive car down a dirt road to escape.”

But the following article is more blunt than I was, A Lot Of Government Officials Should Be Going To Prison For The Hawaii Fires, and if you read the whole thing I think you’ll agree: this is failure from top-to-bottom, across-the-board:

If we had a functioning news media, there’s a video that would be leading every newscast right now. It has nothing to do with a plane crash in Russia, a GOP primary debate, or even the indictment of every lawyer who’s ever given Donald Trump legal advice, as important as all those topics may be. This video is about Americans — including children — who died horribly this month. It’s about how their deaths could have been prevented if their government was even remotely competent.

The footage I’m talking about is an interview with a survivor of the fires in Maui. This interview was conducted not by CNN or NPR but by a real estate agent who moonlights as a citizen journalist. He spoke with a man who goes by “Fish” and survived the blaze in Lahaina. Here’s what that man saw. . . .

He says, “All the cars were lined up, but none of them were moving. . . . And I was wondering what was stopping the traffic. It was a policeman.”

Here’s that citizen video: