At 3:30 pm, August 8, 2023, Lahaina's water monitoring system went dark. By morning, 102 people were dead. Investigators found 84 governance failures. A $1,000 vegetation fine never enforced. In Brumadinho, companies paid 3.4% of fines; the river was destroyed again.

This study hypothesizes that fine structure predicts disaster recurrence better than enforcement record alone and will test this hypothesis across 25 formally investigated cases, producing an open-access penalty-ratio dataset.