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(AP) — A raging wildfire that swept through a picturesque town on the Hawaiian island of Maui this week has killed at least 89 people, authorities said Saturday, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire of the past century.
The new death toll Saturday came as federal emergency workers with axes and cadaver dogs picked through the aftermath of the blaze, marking the ruins of homes with a bright orange X for an initial search and HR when they found human remains.
Dogs worked the rubble, and their occasional bark — used to alert their handlers to a possible corpse — echoed over the hot and colorless landscape.
The inferno that swept through the centuries-old town of Lahaina on Maui’s west coast four days earlier torched hundreds of homes and turned a lush, tropical area into a moonscape of ash. The state’s governor predicted more bodies will be found.
“It’s going to rise,” Gov. Josh Green remarked Saturday as he toured the devastation on historic Front Street. “It will certainly be the worst natural disaster that Hawaii ever faced. ... We can only wait and support those who are living. Our focus now is to reunite people when we can and get them housing and get them health care, and then turn to rebuilding.”
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said two of the 89 victims have been identified so far, adding that identifying the dead is extremely challenging because “we pick up the remains and they fall apart.”
“When we find our family and our friends, the remains that we’re finding are through a fire that melted metal. We have to do rapid DNA to identify them. Every one of these 89 are John and Jane Does,” he said. “We know we’ve got to go quick, but we’ve got to do it right,”
At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, of which 86% were residential. Across the island, he added, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion. He said it would take “an incredible amount of time” to recover.”
At least two other fires have been burning in Maui, with no fatalities reported thus far: in south Maui’s Kihei area and in the mountainous, inland communities known as Upcountry. A fourth broke out Friday evening in Kaanapali, a coastal community in West Maui north of Lahaina, but crews were able to extinguish it, authorities said.
Green said the Upcountry fire had affected 544 structures, of which 96% were residential.
Emergency managers in Maui were searching for places to house people displaced from their homes. As many as 4,500 people are in need of shelter, county officials said on Facebook early Saturday, citing figures from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Pacific Disaster Center.
Those who escaped counted their blessings, thankful to be alive as they mourned those who didn’t make it.
Retired fire captain Geoff Bogar and his friend of 35 years, Franklin Trejos, initially stayed behind to help others in Lahaina and save Bogar’s house. But as the flames moved closer and closer Tuesday afternoon, they knew they had to get out. Each escaped to his own car. When Bogar’s wouldn’t start, he broke through a window to get out, then crawled on the ground until a police patrol found him and brought him to a hospital.
Trejos wasn’t as lucky. When Bogar returned the next day, he found the bones of his 68-year-old friend in the back seat of his car, lying on top of the remains of the Bogars’ beloved 3-year-old golden retriever Sam, whom he had tried to protect.
Trejos, a native of Costa Rica, had lived for years with Bogar and his wife, Shannon Weber-Bogar, helping her with her seizures when her husband couldn’t. He filled their lives with love and laughter.
“God took a really good man,” Weber-Bogar said.
Bill Wyland, who lives on the island of Oahu but owns an art gallery on Lahaina’s historic Front Street, fled on his Harley Davidson, whipping the motorcycle onto empty sidewalks Tuesday to avoid traffic-jammed roads as embers burned the hair off the back of his neck.
Riding in winds he estimated to be at least 70 miles per hour (112 kilometers per hour), he passed a man on a bicycle who was pedaling for his life.
“It’s something you’d see in a Twilight Zone, horror movie or something,” Wyland said.
The newly released death toll surpassed the toll of the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California, which left 85 dead and destroyed the town of Paradise. A century earlier, the 1918 Cloquet Fire broke out in drought-stricken northern Minnesota and raced through a number of rural communities, destroying thousands of homes and killing hundreds.
The wildfires are the state’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, surpassing a 1960 tsunami that killed 61 people. An even deadlier tsunami in 1946, which killed more than 150 on the Big Island, prompted the development of a territory-wide emergency alert system with sirens that are tested monthly.
Hawaii emergency management records do not indicate the warning sirens sounded before the fire hit the town. Officials sent alerts to mobile phones, televisions, and radio stations, but widespread power and cellular outages may have limited their reach.
Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, the wildfires on Maui raced through parched brush covering the island.
The most serious blaze swept into Lahaina on Tuesday and destroyed nearly every building in the town of 13,000, leaving a grid of gray rubble wedged between the blue ocean and lush green slopes.
Front Street, the heart of the historic downtown and Maui’s economic hub, was nearly empty of life Saturday morning. An Associated Press journalist encountered one barefoot resident carrying a laptop and a passport, who asked where the nearest shelter was. Another, riding a bicycle, took stock of the damage at the harbor, where he said his boat caught fire and sank.
Maui water officials warned Lahaina and Kula residents not to drink running water, which may be contaminated even after boiling, and to only take short, lukewarm showers in well-ventilated rooms to avoid possible chemical vapor exposure.
The danger on Maui was well known. Maui County’s hazard mitigation plan updated in 2020 identified Lahaina and other West Maui communities as having frequent wildfires and several buildings at risk. The report also noted West Maui had the island’s second-highest rate of households without a vehicle and the highest rate of non-English speakers.
“This may limit the population’s ability to receive, understand and take expedient action during hazard events,” the plan stated.
Maui’s firefighting efforts may have been hampered by limited staff and equipment.
Bobby Lee, president of the Hawaii Firefighters Association, said there are a maximum of 65 county firefighters working at any given time, who are responsible for three islands: Maui, Molokai, and Lanai.
Green said officials will review policies and procedures to improve safety.
“People have asked why we are reviewing what’s going on and it’s because the world has changed. A storm now can be a hurricane-fire or a fire-hurricane,” he said. “That’s what we experienced, that’s why we’re looking into these policies, to find out how we can best protect our people.”
Riley Curran said he fled his Front Street home after climbing up a neighboring building to get a better look. He doubts county officials could have done more, given the speed of the onrushing flames.
“It’s not that people didn’t try to do anything,” Curran said. “The fire went from zero to 100.”
Curran said he had seen horrendous wildfires growing up in California.
But, he added, “I’ve never seen one eat an entire town in four hours.”
Melissa Crick was heartbroken this week while watching videos on her phone of people fleeing from a fast-moving wildfire in Hawaii.
“Sending love and support from Paradise, California,” Crick commented on one woman’s social media post.
To Crick’s surprise, the woman wrote back. She knew Paradise — the small Northern California city in the Sierra Nevada foothills that was mostly destroyed by a wildfire in 2018. The woman told Crick her support meant a lot to her.
“That was a really heavy moment,” Crick told The Associated Press.
Lahaina, Hawaii, is a tropical paradise on the northwest coast of Maui. But wildfires ravaging the region have forever linked it to another Paradise, this one in California. The two small towns have the grim distinction of experiencing the deadliest U.S. wildfires in more than a century — tragedies that played out in a remarkably similar way.
“It’s not what we want to be remembered for,” Crick said.
Both blazes moved quickly, leaving people with very little time to flee. Both places were isolated, with few roads leading in or out. The California fire killed at least 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures. The Hawaii fire has so far killed at least 80 people and destroyed more than 1,000 buildings.
Most people would think a place like Paradise — located in the forests of wildfire-prone California — wouldn’t share a lot of similarities with a small town in Hawaii, a state known for its lush landscapes.
But the two places have more in common than you would think, especially when it comes to wildfires, said Hugh Safford, a fire and vegetation ecologist at the University of California-Davis. The wildfire risks for both places have been well known for years, especially as a changing climate has ushered in hotter, drier seasons that have made wildfires more intense, he noted.
“I’m not at all surprised that Hawaii has had a fire like this,” Safford said. “It was just a matter of time.”
As images filled news reports from Hawaii this week, Paradise was one of the only other places in the U.S. where people truly knew what it was like. It wasn’t a good feeling, residents say.
“It immediately triggers, for all of us ... the emotions. It’s remembering the fear,” said Steve “Woody” Culleton, a member of the Paradise Town Council who lost his home in the 2018 fire. “It’s a tremendous sense of sadness, and you try to push it down.”
At the Paradise Rotary Club meeting on Wednesday, members acknowledged the Hawaii wildfire with a moment of silence. But they quickly moved on to how they could help.
Pam Gray, a Rotary Club member who lost her home in the 2018 fire, said the local club received more than $2.1 million in donations in the weeks after the blaze. The club used the money to hand out gift cards to people and pay for things such as tree removal. Now, Gray said, the club will be looking to return the favor to Hawaii.
“This whole community of people experienced what we did. If we continue to wallow in it every day, all day, then we can’t get better and our community can’t get better and we cannot help anyone else,” she said. “We went through that experience for a reason. And I believe it was to help other people.”
But others, including Laura Smith, have not felt an urge yet to jump in and help. Smith lost her home and almost everything she owned in the 2018 fire. She said it was so overwhelming, it felt like she was “living in a lion’s mouth.”
“My sense is that the folks there just need space to process what just happened to them and to not be overflowing with platitudes with how everything is going to be fine, because it certainly will not be fine for a long time,” Smith said. “I mean, I am sure that they’ll recover. We did. I have. My kids have. But it’s still a wound that we struggle with sometimes.”
In Paradise on Wednesday, hundreds of people showed up for a ceremony to celebrate the opening of a new, state-of-the-art building at the local high school. The school was one of the few places that did not burn in the 2018 fire, becoming an anchor of sorts for the community’s rebuilding efforts.
The school library displayed various yearbooks from past classes, allowing alumni a chance to remember happier times. Conversations soon drifted to the Hawaii fire, and then inevitably back to the Paradise fire, said Crick, who attended the event as president of the Paradise Unified School District school board.
Crick couldn’t help but wonder: Would the survivors of the Hawaii wildfires gather in five years to peruse their own past?
“What does it look like for their community?” she asked. “How do we support somebody even more secluded than we were when our fire happened?”
Mayor Greg Bolin said everyone he spoke to at the Paradise recovery event said their minds were on the victims in Hawaii.
“You know what their life is going to be like. ... You know how hard and how difficult times are going to be,” he said. “But if they stay with it, there is hope on the other side. It does come together. And our town is coming back.”