Deadliest wildfire: Hawaii death toll rises to 93

Al Jazeera :
People in the Hawaiian resort town ravaged by a horrific inferno have expressed anger as the death toll from the wildfires rose to 93 on Saturday, making it officially the deadliest US wildfire in more than 100 years.

Officials said the death toll might go up further as search teams continued sifting through the ruins of Lahaina town located on Maui island.

The resort town of more than 12,000 people has been reduced to ruins, its lively hotels and restaurants turned to ashes.

In a news conference on Saturday, Governor Josh Green said the number of confirmed deaths from the Maui wildfires had risen to 89, making it the deadliest US wildfire in more than 100 years. Maui County later raised the confirmed death toll to 93.

“It’s going to continue to rise. We want to brace people for that,” Green told reporters.
“It will certainly be the worst natural disaster that Hawaii ever faced,” Green said as he toured the devastation on historic Front Street.

The latest figure exceeded the 85 people who perished in a 2018 fire in the town of Paradise, California and was the highest death toll from a wildfire since 1918 when the Cloquet fire in Minnesota and Wisconsin killed 453 people.

Maui police chief John Pelletier said only a fraction of the disaster zone had been searched, and only two of the victims could be identified because they were burned badly.

He added that cadaver dogs trained to detect bodies had covered only 3 percent of the search area.

“The remains we’re finding are from a fire that melted metal,” he said. “We have to do rapid DNA [testing] to identify every one of these.

“When we pick up the remains … they fall apart.”

The cost to rebuild Lahaina was estimated at $5.5bn, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), with more than 2,200 structures damaged or destroyed and more than 2,100 acres (850 hectares) burned.

“Our focus now is to reunite people when we can and get them housing and get them health care, and then turn to rebuilding,” Governor Green said, adding that it would take “an incredible amount of time” to recover.

At least two other fires have been burning on Maui, with no fatalities reported thus far: in south Maui’s Kihei area and in the mountainous, inland communities known as Upcountry.

A fourth broke out Friday evening in Kaanapali, a coastal community north of Lahaina, but crews were able to extinguish it, authorities said.

Green said the Upcountry fire had affected 544 structures, of which 96 percent were residential.