After Maui Wildfires Kill 96, Search for the Missing Continues

KAHULUI, Hawaii (Reuters) – The death toll from the Maui wildfires reached 96 on Sunday as relatives of the missing frantically searched for signs their loved ones may still be alive, while survivors grappled with the scale of the disaster.

Days after the inferno destroyed much of the historic resort town of Lahaina on Tuesday and Wednesday, crews of firefighters were still battling flare-ups, and cadaver dogs were sifting through the town’s charred ruins in search of victims.

The death toll made the blaze Hawaii’s worst natural disaster, surpassing a tsunami that killed 61 people in 1960, a year after Hawaii became a U.S. state.

It was also the largest number of deaths from a U.S. wildfire since 1918, when 453 people died in the Cloquet fire in Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association.

Hawaii Governor Josh Green warned at a press conference on Saturday the death toll would continue to climb as more victims were discovered. Dogs trained to detect bodies have covered only 3% of the search area, Maui County Police Chief John Pelletier said.

Hundreds remained missing, though a precise count was unclear.

Hawaii Governor Green vowed to investigate the response to the blaze and the emergency notification systems after some residents questioned whether more could have been done to warn them.

Some witnesses said they had little warning, describing their terror as the blaze destroyed the town around them in what seemed like minutes. Others dove into the Pacific Ocean to escape.

Sirens stationed around the island, intended to warn of impending natural disasters, never sounded, and widespread power and cellular outages hampered other forms of alerts.

“We’ll know soon whether or not they did enough to get those sirens going,” Green told MSNBC.

The cost to rebuild Lahaina was estimated at $5.5 billion, 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.