Tallying losses of deadly Maui wildfires still in early stages, officials say
Confirmed death toll rises to 96, with cost to rebuild estimated at nearly $6B US
Searchers with cadaver dogs have been going through the remains of buildings in the west Maui community of Lahaina, looking for victims of devastating wildfires on the Hawaiian island, as officials tally the loss of life and destruction of property.
The number of confirmed deaths rose to 96 over the weekend, according to Maui County, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, surpassing the toll of a 2018 wildfire in northern California that left 85 dead.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said the toll is expected to continue to rise, noting that efforts to find and identify the dead were still in the early stages.
"We are prepared for many tragic stories," Green told CBS Mornings in a recorded interview that was aired Monday. "They will find 10 to 20 people per day, probably, until they finish. And it's probably going to take 10 days. It's impossible to guess, really."
As cell phone service has slowly been restored, Green had said that the number of people missing dropped to about 1,300, from over 2,000.
Twenty cadaver dogs and dozens of people are making their way through blocks reduced to ash.
"Right now, they're going street by street, block by block between cars, and soon they'll start to enter buildings," Jeff Hickman, the director of public affairs for the Hawaii Department of Defense, said Monday on NBC's Today.
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said crews have covered just three per cent of the search area.
Pelletier said very few bodies have been identified because the remains are badly damaged by a fire hot enough to melt metal. He called on relatives of the missing to undergo DNA testing to help identify remains.
"We've got an area that we have to contain that is at least five square miles and it is full of our loved ones," noting that the death toll is likely to grow and "none of us really know the size of it yet."
Emotions running high
"The community is reeling right now," Nicholas Winfrey, president of Maui United Way told CBC News on Sunday, speaking from Wailuku.
In the last few days, Winfrey said, "it's been an explosion of individuals coming together in every form and fashion to try to support in any way they can."
"But really, in all honesty, it's devastation, it's moments of levity, it's toughness, but it's also the aloha spirit, which has been here longer than I have been here, of people coming together to do anything that they can to support those in need."
Many of the survivors took to Sunday church services, including Akanesi Vaa, 38, who said her family got stuck in traffic while trying to escape the flames.
Vaa, her husband and her children, aged 15, 13 and nine, resorted to fleeing on foot and jumping a fence to safety. Along the way, she said, an elderly woman pleading for help handed her a baby to care for. The woman and her husband were also able to make it over the fence.
"I think a lot of us needed to hear today's message," Vaa said after attending church at King's Cathedral in Kahului. "All these ashes are going to turn into beauty. I know Lahaina will come back 10 times stronger."
Scott Landis, pastor at Keawala'i Church, a United Church of Christ congregation in Makena, said an unusually large crowd of 100 people showed, nearly double what he would have expected on a typical Sunday in August.
"They were really listening. You could tell people were here, looking for a word of hope," Landis said.
Among them were people who have family and friends unaccounted for, and they are "fearing the worst," he added.
Damages estimates sit near $6B US
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) pegged an early estimate of the damage at $5.52 billion US, while Green said it was nearing $6 billion US across the island.
At least 2,700 buildings were damaged or destroyed in west Maui, Green said, a large majority of which were residential. He said it would take an "incredible amount of time to recover."
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About 4,500 people have been left homeless, the governor said. However, officials have secured 1,000 hotel rooms for displaced locals and FEMA personnel. More than 1,400 people have been taken in at emergency shelters.
Among those helping is Celine Scarlet, a Canadian who is living in Maui. She's working at the missing person's desk at one of the shelters, where emotions are high.
"We had little moments of pure joy, telling people that their loved ones have been found, and moments of despair, when the people, we had to tell them they hadn't been located," she told CBC News.
Hawaii emergency management records do not indicate that warning sirens sounded before the fire hit Lahaina. Officials sent alerts to cellphones, televisions and radio stations, but widespread power and cellular outages may have limited their reach.
The power outages were expected to last several weeks in west Maui.
Fuelled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, the wildfires on Maui raced through parched brush covering the island and swept into Lahaina on Tuesday.
Green said officials will review policies and procedures to improve safety.
"People have asked why we are reviewing what's going on, and it's because the world has changed. A storm now can be a hurricane-fire or a fire-hurricane," Green said. "That's what we experienced. That's why we're looking into these policies, to find out how we can best protect our people."
"It outpaced anything firefighters could have done in the early hours," U.S. Fire Administrator Lori Moore-Merrell said Saturday, adding that it moved horizontally, structure to structure, and "incredibly fast."
With files from The Associated Press and Reuters
