Two weeks after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century swept through the Maui community of Lahaina, authorities say more than 800 people remain unaccounted for.
It’s a staggering number that presents huge challenges for officials trying to determine how many of those perished and how many may have made it to safety but haven’t checked in.
Something similar happened in 2018, after a wildfire killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, Calif. Authorities there ultimately published a list of the missing in the local newspaper, a decision that helped identify scores of people who had made it out alive but were listed as missing. Within a month, the list dropped from 1,300 names to only a dozen.
Maui authorities have opted not to publicize their list because it’s unclear whether privacy rules would prevent them from doing so, said Adam Weintraub, spokesperson for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. There are also concerns about further traumatizing families of those who are now listed as missing but may turn out to be dead.
“The names of, and any information related to the missing individuals, will not be published or be made publicly available at this time,” a Maui County spokesperson said via text message.
As of Monday, there were 115 people confirmed dead, according to Maui police.
Days of searching through debris for victims of the deadly Maui wildfires are taking a physical and emotional toll on emergency workers. Some say they can’t sleep after the horrific images they’ve seen.
The FBI’s Honolulu office is assisting Maui officials in locating the missing, in part by collecting DNA samples from relatives, the agency said in a statement last week.
While the number of unaccounted for is in the hundreds, it is down from an estimated 2,000 just a few days ago.
Arduous process
The American Red Cross said it generates its own list — separate from law enforcement — of people who are unaccounted for through requests made to its call centre and information gathered by its field teams, spokesperson Daniel Parra said. The organization has also entered into a data-sharing agreement with federal, state and local government agencies to help with reunifications.
So far, the American Red Cross has successfully completed roughly 2,400 requests seeking reunification or welfare updates, out of the more than 3,000 it has received, Parra said. A completed request means the organization was able to locate a missing person or verify someone’s status in a medical facility, for example, among other things.
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At least 114 people have died in the Maui wildfires, and authorities expect that number to rise. Andrew Chang investigates how natural disaster death tolls are calculated and why attaining a truly accurate death count is so hard to do.
To find people, the organization cross-checks names with emergency shelter registration lists, calls hospitals to see if the person was admitted as a patient and combs through social media, among other steps, Parra said.
Social outreach like this will be crucial as identifying human remains after wildfires — and confirming whether those who are unaccounted for are deceased — can be an arduous, lengthy process.
Fire experts say it’s possible there may be no remains left to identify some people through DNA tests. Nearly 22 years after the 9/11 terror attacks, some 1,100 of the 3,000 killed have no identified remains.
Dozens of dead yet to be publicly named
Vyto Babrauskas, president of fire safety research consulting firm Fire Science and Technology Inc., said that damage from debris removal and excavation can also make recovery efforts difficult. Some 2,200 structures are estimated to have been damaged or destroyed.
“This is such an extreme disaster,” said Babrauskas. “It is so rare to need this kind of tallying and identification.”
Many of the few dozen confirmed dead so far are senior citizens.
According to the U.S. Fire Administration, people over the age of 65 face the greatest relative risk of dying in a fire: 2.6 times higher than that of the general population. Research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Fire Administration tie this trend among seniors to greater frailty and difficulty escaping.
U.S. President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, got a close-up look at the devastation on Monday, seeing block after block of hollowed-out homes and other structures, charred cars, singed trees and piles of debris as his motorcade wound through Lahaina.
The Biden administration has distributed more than $8.5 million US in aid to some 8,000 affected families, about 40 per cent of that total rental assistance, and on Monday appointed a chief federal response co-ordinator for the Maui wildfires to oversee the long-term recovery of the area.
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