“110 people have been confirmed dead,” Hawaii Governor Josh Green said Wednesday, August 16, at a press conference, after the discovery of four additional bodies. Research continues on the archipelago pending a visit from President Joe Biden next Monday. The balance sheet could still increase considerably. Because a week after the terrible fire, rescuers and sniffer dogs searching the rubble of Lahaina, historic Maui, have only inspected 38% of the area, according to authorities.
“This is a very difficult search operation,” said Deanne Criswell, head of the federal disaster response agency (Fema). Forensic pathologists equipped with a mobile morgue arrived as reinforcements on Tuesday. The teams mobilized now include experts who have worked on the September 11 attacks, plane crashes or monster fires in the United States. However, the task remains difficult to locate and identify the corpses in Lahaina, which had 12,000 inhabitants before the disaster. The true extent of the drama may not be known for several weeks.
The fire has been so intense in the former capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii that it has melted the metal: many homes have been reduced to ashes and the bodies found are often unrecognizable. Only a handful of bodies have been identified so far. Relatives of missing persons are encouraged to give their DNA to facilitate the identification of corpses. Given the number of tourists present at the time of the disaster, this again represents a considerable challenge.
Authorities will “have to put in place some sort of system” for relatives of missing vacationers to go to their “local police station” anywhere in the United States to provide a DNA sample, said Adam Weintraub, a senior official. of the Hawaiian Crisis Management Agency. Hundreds of people are still missing. Among them, some are gradually located by their relatives as communications are restored on the island, but others will inevitably join the ranks of the victims of the tragedy.
President Joe Biden will visit the archipelago next Monday with his wife Jill, the White House announced on Wednesday. The couple are to “meet with rescue teams, survivors and officials” on Monday, August 21, spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement on Wednesday. “I remain committed to making sure the people of Hawaii have everything they need to recover from this disaster,” the president wrote on X (ex-Twitter).
Joe Biden had quickly declared a state of natural disaster in Hawaii, which allowed the deployment of emergency assistance from the federal state, and spoke several times with the governor of the state, Josh Green. But he was criticized by the Republican opposition for his response deemed insufficient, even indifferent, to these fires. If he had quickly mentioned the disaster at the beginning of a speech last Thursday in Utah, the president did not speak publicly when the balance sheet worsened heavily over the weekend.
In Hawaii, local authorities are also under fire: the warning sirens used in the event of a tsunami have not sounded and the alerts on television, radio and on cell phones have been largely useless because of power outages. fluent. Completely taken aback, dozens of Lahaina residents threw themselves into the sea to escape the flames.
An investigation has been opened to examine the management of the crisis and the feeling of abandonment rumbles among some locals. The electricity supplier Hawaiian Electric is also the subject of a complaint. He is accused of negligence and of not having cut off the current from the start of the fires, which could have increased the risk of fires due to the fall of many electric poles. “What happened, in my opinion, borders on negligence,” Annelise Cochran, a 30-something who had to jump into the water to survive, told AFP.
Fueled by the passage of a hurricane off Hawaii, these fires occurred in the middle of a summer marked by extreme events on the planet, linked to global warming according to experts, including mega forest fires in Canada.