The number of victims of the fire in Hawaii exceeds a hundred

A woman laments while walking through the remains of a burned house in Lahaina (Hawaii). ETIENNE LAURENT (EFE)

The number of victims of the Maui fire continues to rise. Josh Green, the governor of Hawaii, reported Tuesday night that emergency teams have recovered the remains of 106 people. Local authorities have warned that the death toll will rise as rescuers make their way through the scorched remains of residential areas in Lahaina, west of the Hawaiian island. Green has assured CNN that the tracking dogs have only covered 32% of the area consumed by the flames.

Maui County announced Tuesday night that it has managed to identify two people among the hundred deaths from the deadliest fire in the United States since 1918. The first victims are Robert Dyckman, 74, and Buddy Jantoc. Both were from Lahaina, a city of 13,000 people. 86% of the affected area in this city, which was the capital of Hawaii for 25 years in the 19th century, was registered as residential use. 9% were businesses and shops.

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The Maui Police have indicated that they have managed to identify three other people, but their names and ages will not be made public until their relatives are contacted by the authorities. “The county’s top priority is to handle this situation with the utmost sensitivity and respect for all those who are grieving,” the statement said.

The Department of Health and Human Services has dispatched a special team of medical examiners to expedite the identification of the 101 bodies that remain unknown. The group sent by Washington includes pathologists and technicians who operate autopsy tables and X-ray units in a mobile morgue that will process mortal remains more expeditiously. “It will be a very, very difficult mission,” admitted Governor Greene, who has asked for patience from people who have reported disappearances to the police.

The police chief, John Pelletier, has once again asked relatives of the missing to provide DNA samples to facilitate the identification of the victims. The authorities have received, until this Tuesday, only 41. For this reason they have insisted on the message to loved ones. The laboratory specialists have obtained 13 genetic profiles of the hundred bodies found.

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Alicia Bárcena, Mexico’s Foreign Minister, has affirmed the night of this Tuesday that two of the victims of the fire are Mexican citizens. The secretary has not given more details about these people, but she has indicated on social networks that the consulate staff is attending to their families.

The Hawaii fire has surpassed the Camp Fire, which left 85 dead and 249 missing in 2018 in northern California. To find a larger incident, you have to go back more than a century, when the so-called Cloquet Fire consumed a drought-stricken area of ​​northern Minnesota, destroying thousands of homes and leaving more than 400 victims.

The Maui catastrophe may also become one of the most onerous for insurers. Karen Clark & ​​Company, a Boston-based risk modeling firm, estimates that material losses may exceed $3.2 billion (2.9 billion euros). The company claims that more than 2,200 buildings were hit by the flames, while another 800 were also damaged by smoke. The county of Maui believes that the costs of the reconstruction will touch the 5,400 million euros.

The analysis of this company, carried out with official information published this weekend, affirms that some 3,500 buildings were within the perimeter of the fire that started on August 4 and that it advanced rapidly thanks to winds of up to 95 kilometers per hour. Clark & ​​Company estimates that the damage caused will be the second highest in the history of the archipelago after that caused by Hurricane Iniki in September 1992. At the time, the storm caused economic damage that cost insurers $3.1 billion, which today would represent about 6,000 million dollars. State Farm, one of the largest insurers in the United States, reported Tuesday that it has received 830 claims from its customers in Lahaina.

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