Research continues sporadically to deliver its macabre tally in Maui, on the American archipelago of Hawaii, where the town of Lahaina was almost razed by fires.
“110 people have been confirmed dead,” Hawaii Governor Josh Green said Wednesday, August 16, at a press conference, announcing the discovery of four additional bodies. This toll could rise considerably. Because a week after the tragedy, rescuers and sniffer dogs searching the rubble of Lahaina, historic Maui, have only inspected 38% of the affected areas, 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 other monster fires in the United States.
Considerable challenge
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 have been identified so far. Relatives of missing persons are encouraged to give their DNA to facilitate the identification of the corpses. Due to 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 kind of system” allowing 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.
Joe Biden criticized
President Joe Biden will visit the archipelago on Monday August 21 with his wife Jill, the White House announced on Wednesday. The couple must “meet with rescue teams, survivors as well as officials,” their 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 made it possible to deploy emergency assistance resources from the federal state, and he met several times with the governor of the state, Josh Green.
But he was criticized by the Republican opposition for his response deemed insufficient or even indifferent to these fires. If he had quickly mentioned the disaster at the beginning of a speech, Thursday, in Utah, the president did not speak publicly when the balance sheet worsened heavily over the weekend.
The authorities assume the silence of the sirens
In Lahaina, dozens of residents taken aback threw themselves into the sea to escape the flames, and anger is brewing among some survivors. For the past week, a lawsuit for incompetence has been brought against the local authorities, in particular because the alarm sirens have not sounded on Maui. But this was not an oversight or negligence and was publicly assumed on Wednesday.
The sirens “are used primarily for tsunamis” and residents “are trained to take shelter at altitude” when they sound, Herman Andaya, head of the Hawaii Crisis Management Agency, told reporters. (EMA) by ensuring not to regret having left them silent.
The fire was burning on the heights of Lahaina and the authorities therefore preferred to stick to alerts on television, radio and on smartphones, for fear that the inhabitants rush towards the fire, he summarized.
These warnings have often proved unnecessary due to the multiple power and network outages suffered by the island, battered by high winds fueled by a hurricane in the middle of the Pacific.
“It’s true that when I arrived in Hawaii, people said to me, ‘if you hear a siren, there’s a tsunami and you have to go to the heights,'” said added Governor Green.
The electricity supplier Hawaiian Electric is also the subject of a complaint because it did not voluntarily cut off the power, which may have increased the risk of fires due to the fall of many electric poles. In the future “we would like to bury the power lines,” the governor said. “We intend to invest heavily in this area during the reconstruction. »
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.
