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Maui death toll climbs to 89 as residents survey devastation

Left: Sarah Salmonese sits where her apartment once stood in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Friday, two days after it was devastated by wildfire. A historic coastal town that was once home to 13,000 people is a desolate ruin. With the death toll into the dozens and rising, the true scope of the tragedy is still unfolding. Below: Anthony C. Garcia, 80, who has lived in Lahaina for 25 years, rests under a damaged banyan tree at the Lahaina Banyan Court after a wildfire swept through the town. (PHILIP CHEUNG)
Left: Sarah Salmonese sits where her apartment once stood in Lahaina, Hawaii, on Friday, two days after it was devastated by wildfire. A historic coastal town that was once home to 13,000 people is a desolate ruin. With the death toll into the dozens and rising, the true scope of the tragedy is still unfolding. Below: Anthony C. Garcia, 80, who has lived in Lahaina for 25 years, rests under a damaged banyan tree at the Lahaina Banyan Court after a wildfire swept through the town. (PHILIP CHEUNG)
By Mitch Smith, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Serge F. Kovaleski, Jill Cowan and Kellen Browning New York Times

New York Times

The death toll from the wildfires on Maui rose to 89 on Saturday, making it the deadliest wildfire event in the United States in more than 100 years.

Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii said the tally was expected to rise as more federal emergency workers arrived Saturday to help search inside badly damaged homes and buildings.

Federal officials have estimated it would take at least $5.5 billion to rebuild the charred town of Lahaina.

Questions were also emerging about the government response and whether officials gave residents enough warning as winds whipped wildfires into a destructive inferno.

In one glaring example, none of the 80 warning sirens placed around Maui was activated by the island or state’s emergency management agencies as the fire bore down on the town of Lahaina, a spokesperson for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency, Adam Weintraub, said Saturday. He stressed that the sirens alone would not have been a signal to evacuate but to seek more information.

Three days after the fire leveled Lahaina, a historic seaside town in western Maui, with no official list of fatalities, many family and friends were still frantically seeking news of loved ones, their search complicated by spotty cellphone and internet connections. One family resorted to passing out photos; others posted pleas online.

Here’s what else to know:

• The Federal Emergency Management Agency said Saturday that more than 150 of its employees were on the ground in Hawaii, including urban search-and-rescue teams and a canine search team. More crews were on their way, the agency said.

• A report prepared for Maui County in 2020 warned that the western side of the island, where Lahaina is located, was at a high risk for wildfire. The hazard mitigation plan prepared for the county said that West Maui had the highest annual probability for wildfires of all the communities in the county, with a more than 90% chance, of wildfires each year on average.

• Questions are mounting about whether officials could have warned residents with more notice or evacuated them sooner. Green told CNN that he had authorized a review of the emergency response, and the state’s attorney general, Anne Lopez, said she was launching a “comprehensive review” of the decision-making before the fires. Some local officials said the speed of the blaze made it “nearly impossible” to have alerted residents.

• The local police chief in Maui said Thursday that 1,000 people were missing, but history suggests that number might not be a good estimate for the final tally of victims. In 2018, the number of missing after the deadly Camp fire in California swelled to 1,300 in the early days before 85 people were ultimately confirmed dead.

• Viewed from above, the ashen and charred aftermath of the burned areas is in striking contrast with some lush, landscaped resorts that remain standing and the turquoise ocean. Much of Lahaina was an old whaling village built from wood, and a long line of abandoned, burned cars in its streets showed how little time residents had to escape as flames overtook the town.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.