What about Hawaii's warning sirens?

 What about Hawaii's warning sirens? 

Hawaii has a statewide outdoor warning siren system, which can be used to notify residents ahead of natural disasters or human-caused events, including tsunamis, hurricanes, dam breaches, flooding, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, terrorist threats and hazardous material incidents, according to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.  

But U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, whose district includes Maui, said Sunday on "Face the Nation" that the warning sirens "likely did not go off." Maui's fire chief later confirmed to CBS News' Jonathan Vigliotti that the sirens did not go off.

"Everybody who has ever lived in Hawaii knows the warning sirens. It goes off once a month, every month, at 12 noon and it blares. And if it doesn't, it gets fixed because that is our first line of defense," Tokuda said.

"Sadly, tragically, in this situation, those sirens likely did not go off," said the congresswoman. She also suggested that warning signals typically sent to mobile phones could have been affected by the widespread power outages reported on Maui at the time.

"The reality is, with those warning signs, it tells all of us to turn on the television or look on our phones or turn on the radio," she said. "With how fast this burn was ... if you turned on your phone, if you turned on a radio, if you even could ... you would not know what the crisis was. You might think it's a tsunami, by the way, which is our first instinct. You would run towards land, which in this case would be towards fire."