“There are more fatalities that will come,” says the governor. “The fire was so hot that what we find is the tragic finding that you would imagine, as though a fire has come through and it’s hard to recognize anybody.”
LOS ANGELES, Aug. 14 — Josh Green, the governor of U.S. state of Hawaii, warned in an interview on Monday that 10 to 20 more wildfire victims could be found per day as search crews continued to comb through scorched ruins on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
The death toll from the wildfires sweeping parts of the second-largest Hawaiian island has risen to 96. It’s the deadliest wildfire in more than a century in modern U.S. history, surpassing the Camp Fire that erupted on Nov. 8, 2018 in California and killed at least 85 people.
Deadly wildfires have nearly completely destroyed the historic town of Lahaina, a popular tourist spot on Maui and once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It’s home to around 13,000 residents.
Green told U.S. commercial broadcast television and radio network CBS in a recorded interview that was aired on Monday that there is a grim expectation of further casualties.
This photo released by the County of Maui on Aug. 10, 2023 shows houses destroyed in a devastating wildfire on Maui Island, Hawaii, the United States.
“There are more fatalities that will come,” Green told the news outlet. “The fire was so hot that what we find is the tragic finding that you would imagine, as though a fire has come through and it’s hard to recognize anybody.”
All residents of Lahaina have either escaped or perished in the fire, the governor was quoted as saying by CBS, but it could take 10 days for a full death toll to be determined as crews could find “10 to 20 people per day probably until they finish.”
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said at a news conference on Saturday that canines had searched only 3 percent of impacted areas.
The Lahaina fire, the devastating wildfire that leveled Lahaina, was 85 percent contained as of Sunday night, said the Maui County in an update.
More than 2,200 structures were damaged or destroyed and 2,170 acres (around 8.78 square kilometers) have burned as a result of the Lahaina fire, according to the assessment of the Pacific Disaster Center, an applied research center managed by the University of Hawaii, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The assessment showed that the estimated cost to rebuild could reach 5.52 billion U.S. dollars.
