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Story by Matt Stieb •5h
The Maui fire’s human toll is already horrific: 115 people have been confirmed dead after a rapidly moving blaze swept across the west side of the Hawaiian island earlier this month, making it the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century. “No one has ever seen this that is alive today,” Maui police chief John Pelleiter said at a news conference Wednesday. “Not this size, not this number, not this volume — and we’re not done.”
Officials expect that the number of dead will rise as rescue teams, including cadaver dogs, continue to search the destroyed town of Lahaina and other areas ravaged by the fire. On Wednesday, the number of missing shot to 1,100, up from 850 as of Monday. To find those who are still unaccounted for, the FBI and the Red Cross have compiled a database of missing people to contact and mark as safe, and local officials have established a family-assistance center to help reunite loved ones. Personal efforts are underway as well, with flyers for the missing posted online and throughout the island. “The country grieves with you, stands with you,” President Biden said in his visit to Lahaina on Monday. Maui County officials intend to release the names of those still missing in the coming days in the hopes that loved ones will be able to confirm that their family and friends are safe or still unaccounted for. Maui Police Chef John Pelletier wanted to ensure that the missing list is “scrubbed” by multiple agencies before it is released to the public and that “we want to make sure we’re respectful as we can.”
The huge number of missing nearly two weeks after the fire does not indicate anything definitive about the ultimate death toll. Steven Merril, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Honolulu field office, told NBC News that the toll of missing person “doesn’t necessarily mean that these people, are in fact, missing.”
The aftermath of the Maui fire left evacuees scattered across the island and rescuers searching through rubble for the remains of victims of a blaze hot enough to melt cars. (As of Monday, officials were only able to identify 27 of the 100-plus victims.) The large number of tourists on the island and the substantial number of homeless residents in Lahaina also pose major challenges, as tourists were likely to head to the mainland — not necessarily aware that they were being searched for — and homeless residents do not always have easily traceable contact information.
“Any time you’ve got a situation where there’s no communication, disrupted transportation, those lead to breakdowns in information sharing as well,” a spokesperson for Hawaii Emergency Management Agency told the Washington Post. But thanks to the return of reliable cell-phone service and the work to reunify families, the number of missing has already decreased from 2,000 in the immediate days after the fire.
Looking at past fires helps put the trend in perspective. After the 2018 Camp Fire, which was the deadliest in modern U.S. history until Maui, over 1,000 people were reported missing. By the time the difficult work of identifying remains was completed, 85 deaths were confirmed — a tragic number, but far short of the early missing figures.
The search effort on Maui remains an extremely difficult effort. Several names on the missing list are just first names, and others do not have identifying information like gender or age. With the search of Lahaina roughly 85 percent complete, recovery teams are now focusing on multi-story buildings that collapsed in the blaze. “We know there are going to be tragedies in the buildings that haven’t yet been searched,” Governor Josh Green told Hawaii News Now. Due to the intensity of the blaze, identifying remains is a tremendous challenge: Officials have encouraged those with missing loved ones to submit DNA to a database to help identify victims whose partial remains have been recovered. “Realistically, we’re going to have a number of confirmed, we’re going to have a number of presumed,” Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The fact that the odds are in their favor is hardly a comfort to those searching for their missing friends and family. “It’s not a numbers game,” Maui police chief John Pelletier said last week. Beth McLeod, a resident of Rochester, New York, has been calling databases searching for her mother-in-law who has not checked in. “We love you, and we’re not going to stop at anything to find you,” McLeod told the local NBC station.
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BFC- How sad and how horrible it must be this far out from the actual fire and not knowing where your loved ones are.
Fair Use-
Story by Matt Stieb •5h
The Maui fire’s human toll is already horrific: 115 people have been confirmed dead after a rapidly moving blaze swept across the west side of the Hawaiian island earlier this month, making it the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century. “No one has ever seen this that is alive today,” Maui police chief John Pelleiter said at a news conference Wednesday. “Not this size, not this number, not this volume — and we’re not done.”
Officials expect that the number of dead will rise as rescue teams, including cadaver dogs, continue to search the destroyed town of Lahaina and other areas ravaged by the fire. On Wednesday, the number of missing shot to 1,100, up from 850 as of Monday. To find those who are still unaccounted for, the FBI and the Red Cross have compiled a database of missing people to contact and mark as safe, and local officials have established a family-assistance center to help reunite loved ones. Personal efforts are underway as well, with flyers for the missing posted online and throughout the island. “The country grieves with you, stands with you,” President Biden said in his visit to Lahaina on Monday. Maui County officials intend to release the names of those still missing in the coming days in the hopes that loved ones will be able to confirm that their family and friends are safe or still unaccounted for. Maui Police Chef John Pelletier wanted to ensure that the missing list is “scrubbed” by multiple agencies before it is released to the public and that “we want to make sure we’re respectful as we can.”
The huge number of missing nearly two weeks after the fire does not indicate anything definitive about the ultimate death toll. Steven Merril, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Honolulu field office, told NBC News that the toll of missing person “doesn’t necessarily mean that these people, are in fact, missing.”
The aftermath of the Maui fire left evacuees scattered across the island and rescuers searching through rubble for the remains of victims of a blaze hot enough to melt cars. (As of Monday, officials were only able to identify 27 of the 100-plus victims.) The large number of tourists on the island and the substantial number of homeless residents in Lahaina also pose major challenges, as tourists were likely to head to the mainland — not necessarily aware that they were being searched for — and homeless residents do not always have easily traceable contact information.
“Any time you’ve got a situation where there’s no communication, disrupted transportation, those lead to breakdowns in information sharing as well,” a spokesperson for Hawaii Emergency Management Agency told the Washington Post. But thanks to the return of reliable cell-phone service and the work to reunify families, the number of missing has already decreased from 2,000 in the immediate days after the fire.
Looking at past fires helps put the trend in perspective. After the 2018 Camp Fire, which was the deadliest in modern U.S. history until Maui, over 1,000 people were reported missing. By the time the difficult work of identifying remains was completed, 85 deaths were confirmed — a tragic number, but far short of the early missing figures.
The search effort on Maui remains an extremely difficult effort. Several names on the missing list are just first names, and others do not have identifying information like gender or age. With the search of Lahaina roughly 85 percent complete, recovery teams are now focusing on multi-story buildings that collapsed in the blaze. “We know there are going to be tragedies in the buildings that haven’t yet been searched,” Governor Josh Green told Hawaii News Now. Due to the intensity of the blaze, identifying remains is a tremendous challenge: Officials have encouraged those with missing loved ones to submit DNA to a database to help identify victims whose partial remains have been recovered. “Realistically, we’re going to have a number of confirmed, we’re going to have a number of presumed,” Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The fact that the odds are in their favor is hardly a comfort to those searching for their missing friends and family. “It’s not a numbers game,” Maui police chief John Pelletier said last week. Beth McLeod, a resident of Rochester, New York, has been calling databases searching for her mother-in-law who has not checked in. “We love you, and we’re not going to stop at anything to find you,” McLeod told the local NBC station.
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BFC- How sad and how horrible it must be this far out from the actual fire and not knowing where your loved ones are.
