Sniffer dog teams had barely covered 3% of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said.
“There is an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles (about 13 square kilometers) and it is full of our loved ones,” he explained. The death toll is likely to rise “and none of us yet know its caliber,” he added.
Pelletier spoke as emergency workers searched the ashen landscape left behind by flames that burned down the century-old town of Lahaina. The teams marked the ruins of the houses with a bright orange X to indicate a preliminary search, and the initials HR when they found human remains.
Pelletier said investigating the deaths was a huge challenge because “we lift the remains and they fall apart… When we found our family and our friends, the remains we found went through a fire that melted the metal.” Two people have been identified so far, he said.
The dogs worked among the rubble, their occasional bark—used to alert their handlers to a possible corpse—resounding across a colorless landscape.
“It will certainly be the worst natural disaster Hawaii has ever faced,” Governor Josh Green said Saturday as he walked along devastated Front Street. “There is nothing left to do but wait and support those who survived. people when we can and give them shelter and medical care, and then dedicate ourselves to rebuilding.”
At least 2,220 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, 86% of which were residential. Island-wide, she added, damage was estimated to be around $6 billion. Recovery will take “an incredible amount of time,” she noted.
The confirmed death toll was later raised to 93, up from the 89 announced at the news conference by Green and other officials.
At least two other fires were burning on Maui, with no fatalities so far, in the southern Kihei area and in inland mountain towns known as the Upcountry. A fourth fire broke out Friday night in Kaanapali, a coastal town north of Lahaina, though crews were able to put it out, authorities said.
Hawaii – fires / AP
PA
The fire in the mountains had affected 544 structures, according to Green, 96% of them residential.
Emergency workers on Maui were looking for shelters for the displaced people. Up to 4,500 people needed shelter, county officials said on Facebook Saturday morning, citing figures from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Pacific Disaster Center.
Pelletier urged people with missing family members to go to the help center and get DNA tests to identify their loved ones.
Green said authorities would review protocols and policies to improve security.
“People ask us why we review what happened and it is because the world has changed. Now a storm can be a hurricane-fire or a fire-hurricane,” she said. “That’s what we’ve experienced and that’s why we’re looking at these policies, to see how we can better protect our people.”
Lahaina resident Riley Curran expressed doubt that county officials could have done more, given the speed at which the flames were spreading. He fled his Front Street home after viewing the fire from the roof of an adjoining building.
“It’s not like people haven’t tried to do anything,” Curran said. “The fire went from zero to 100.”
More than a dozen people formed a human chain Saturday on Kaanapali beach to unload water, hygiene products, batteries and other essentials from a catamaran that had sailed from another part of the island.
Firefighter – Hawaii – rescue – fire / AP
AP/Rick Bowmer
David Taylor, director of marketing for Kai Kanani Siling, which owns the ship, said many of the supplies were for hotel employees who lost their homes and were with their families at their workplaces.
“Aloha still exists,” he said as the group applauded as they finished unloading the ship. “We all feel it very strongly and everyone wants to feel like they can do something.”
Caitlin McKnight, who had volunteered at an emergency shelter at the island’s war memorial, said she was trying to be strong for those who had lost everything.
“It was clear that these people, these families, people from the Maui ohana, had been through a traumatic event,” said McKnight, who used a Hawaiian word for family. “You could see it in his face.”
Returning to their communities
Survivors gazed at a surreal landscape of flattened homes, burned-out cars, and ash-covered land now where buildings stood a few days ago, as they took stock of lives upended by the Maui fire that authorities say claimed the lives of at least one person. least 93 people.
Anthony Garcia surveyed the devastation as he stood under the iconic Lahaina fig tree, now charred, sweeping the twisted branches into neat piles next to another piled with animals. dead: cats, roosters and other birds that perished from the smoke and flames. Somehow, this made sense in a world turned upside down.
“If I don’t do something, I’m going to go crazy,” said Garcia, who has lost everything he had. “I am losing my faith in God.”
Garcia and other residents faced widespread destruction as they assessed what was left of their homes and lives shattered by fires that swept through parts of Maui this week and were still not under control as of Friday night.
Hawaii – Debris / AP
AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
Maui County raised the confirmed death toll to 80 in a statement Friday night. The count could rise as search and rescue operations continued, state Gov. Josh Green warned.
The authorities have established a curfew between 10:00 p.m. and 06:00 a.m. on Saturday.
“The recovery is going to be extraordinarily difficult, but we want people to go back to their homes and do what they can to test them safely, because it’s pretty dangerous,” Green told Hawaii News Now.
Dogs specializing in detecting dead bodies were added to the search operation Friday, Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen Jr. announced.
A new fire prompted the evacuation of Kaanapali, West Maui, a community northeast of an area that had burned before, Friday afternoon, but fire crews put out the flames before 8:30 p.m. authorities said.
Attorney General Anne Lopez announced a comprehensive review of ongoing policies and decision-making affecting the response to the deadly wildfires.
“My department is committed to understanding the decisions that were made before and during the fires and to sharing the results of this review with the public,” Lopez said in a statement.
Hawaii Fire AP.jpg
AP/Rick Bowmer
The fires are the deadliest natural disaster on record in the state in decades, surpassing the tsunami that killed 61 people in 1960. An even deadlier tsunami, which left more than 150 dead on the island of Hawaii —the so-called Isla Grande— in 1946, promoted the development of an emergency system throughout the territory that includes sirens whose operation is checked every month.
But many fire survivors said they hadn’t heard any sirens or received enough advance warning to prepare, realizing they were in danger when they saw flames or heard explosions nearby.
“There was no warning,” said Lynn Robinson, who lost her home in the fire.
Hawaii’s emergency management records show no indication that warning sirens sounded before residents had to flee. Authorities sent alerts to cell phones, television and radio stations, but widespread blackouts in power and mobile phone networks may have limited their reach.
Fanned by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, Maui this week saw at least three wildfires spread rapidly through the parched brush that blankets the island.
Hawaii fire – AP
Tiffany Kidder Winn via AP
The most serious one entered Lahaina on Tuesday and left a grid of debris grays wedged between the blue ocean and the lush green hillsides. Journalists witnessed the devastation: nearly all buildings were reduced to rubble on Front Street, the heart of the Lahaina community and the economic center of the island of Maui.
The fire is expected to be the second costliest disaster in Hawaiian history, trailing only 1992 Hurricane Iniki, according to estimates by forecasting firm Karen Clark & Company. In addition, it is the deadliest fire in the United States since the Camp Fire, registered in 2018 in California, which caused at least 85 deaths and devastated the city of Paradise.
FOUNTAIN: With information from AP
