Hawaii’s governor warned on Monday of an even higher death count after the wildfires on Maui.
The wildfire — the U.S.’s deadliest in more than a century — has claimed 96 lives so far, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green told CBS Mornings.
“We are prepared for many tragic stories,” Green said. “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.”
The fires destroyed the town of Lahaina on Maui’s western coast, including approximately 2,700 structures, most of them homes, Hawaii News Now reported.
More than 1,300 people remain missing, the governor said.
Two fires continued to burn late Sunday and early Monday.
“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.
Twenty cadaver dogs and dozens of people are making their way through blocks reduced to ash, officials said.
“When we find our family and friends, the remains we’re finding is through a fire that melted metal,” Maui Police Chief John Pelletier, per Hawaii News Now. “We have to do rapid DNA to identify them. Every one of these … are John and Jane Does.”
Meanwhile, survivors have been telling horrific stories.
Lifelong Lahaina resident Jubee Bedoya told NBC News that she ran to the ocean to escape the flames.
“We were trapped,” Bedoya said. “There was nothing we could do. That fire and wind just came so fast. There was nothing anybody could do.”
The state Attorney General’s Office said it would conduct a comprehensive review of “critical decision-making” on the Maui wildfires.
Residents say sirens didn’t sound in Lahaina and that they were not warned of danger.
“Of course people will ask that question. We will always try to protect people more. Eventually, those questions will be answered by the emergency management folks, I’m sure,” Gov. Green told Hawaii News Now.
U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) said the state “underestimated the lethality, the quickness of fire.” She declared that emergency alert systems failed.
“We rely on that emergency alert system to keep us safe from a number of things,” she told CNN Saturday. “You think tsunamis. You think other types of emergencies like wildfires. That should have been our first line of defense. Unfortunately, these days the alerts come on our cell phones. But we also know that there was no cell phone coverage.”
