After the devastating wildfires that started on Tuesday subsided, rescue efforts are currently focused on searching for the missing and victims.
The number of people who have died in the wildfires raging in Hawaii in the United States has already risen to 93. A state governor Josh Green warns that the death toll will continue to rise.
– Dogs trained to search for people have only searched three percent of the destroyed area, Maui County Police Director John Pelletier says.
According to Pelletier, no one can know at this stage how big the number of victims actually is.
The fires have particularly affected the island of Maui, where the fire almost completely destroyed the coastal town of Lahaina. More than 2,200 buildings and more than 850 hectares of land were destroyed in the fires.
According to the estimate of the Federal Crisis Management Agency, the reconstruction of the city will cost about 5.5 billion dollars (5 billion euros).
After the devastating wildfires that started on Tuesday subsided, rescue efforts are currently focused on searching for the missing and victims. A representative of the US Emergency Management Agency said earlier for the BBCthat almost 1,000 people are still missing from the fires.
The United States declared the Hawaii wildfires the deadliest wildfire in the United States of the century. The last time the number of deaths in the United States exceeded 85 people was in 2018 in the wildfires that raged in the city of Paradise, California.
– This is definitely the most difficult natural disaster in Hawaii’s history, Green said after inspecting the destruction caused by the wildfires on Saturday.
– Now we want to bring people who have lost each other together and offer them places to stay. After that, we can move on to reconstruction, he continues.
According to Hawaii authorities, more than 4,500 people are currently homeless. Maui authorities have so far managed to reserve more than a thousand hotel rooms for those who lost their homes. In addition, they are preparing to organize rental apartments for families. So far, more than 1,400 people have been accommodated in emergency accommodation centers.
Power outages made it difficult to warn residents
Several different factors contributed to the high death toll.
After the tsunami that hit the Hawaiian Islands in 1946, an alarm system was built in Hawaii to warn of incoming environmental disasters. Although the system is tested monthly, the alarm sirens did not sound when wildfires broke out.
Wildfires also destroyed telephone poles and caused power outages, which in turn made it difficult to warn residents of the impending danger. In the western parts of the island of Maui, power outages may continue for several more weeks.
The situation has almost inevitably also been affected by the low number of fire personnel and equipment. President of the Hawaii Firefighters Association Bobby Lee on the islands of Maui, Molokai and Lanai, a maximum of 65 firefighters can be on duty at the same time.
The last reason has been considered to be the rapid development of the situation. The strong winds caused by the hurricane raging at sea caused the wildfires that started on the drought-stricken island to spread with enormous speed.
The hurricane and another wildfire on the other side of the island of Maui made real-time crisis management challenging for emergency authorities.
– This was not due to the lack of company. The fires simply accelerated from zero to one hundred in an instant, running away from their home Riley Curransays the news agency to AP.
Curran, who grew up in California, says he is used to annual wildfires caused by Santa Ana’s inland winds.
– Still, I’ve never seen flames consume an entire city in four hours before.