The death toll from the Hawaii wildfires has risen to 80, Maui county officials said in an update late Friday, as firefighters continued work to contain fires on the island. Government officials are launching a review of the state’s emergency response, as residents criticized relief efforts as insufficient and records indicated that emergency sirens weren’t activated at the state or county level during the wildfires, though alerts were sent to cellphones and broadcast networks.
The cost to rebuild the historic resort town was estimated at $5.5 billion, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), after the fast-moving flames consumed more than 1,000 buildings and leveled almost the entire town.
Officials vowed to examine the state's emergency notification systems after some residents questioned whether more could have been done to warn people before the fire overtook their homes. Some were forced to wade into the Pacific Ocean to escape.
Sirens stationed around the island - intended to warn of impending natural disasters - never sounded, and widespread power and cellular outages hampered other forms of alerts.
Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez (D) said her department would begin a “comprehensive review of critical decision-making and standing policies leading up to, during, and after the wildfires.” Gov. Josh Green (D) told CNN officials would investigate why sirens reportedly failed to warn residents in Maui, adding that the telecommunications lines that those sirens relied upon were “destroyed very rapidly” by the fast-moving flames.
The scale of the damage is becoming clearer, with an assessment from the Pacific Disaster Center estimating that more than 2,207 structures were damaged, and that the vast majority of buildings exposed to the fire were residential. Authorities on Maui say more than 1,400 people are in emergency shelters, and urged residents to text rather than call as cell service resumes in affected areas, to ensure limited resources are shared.
Local officials also advised residents to exclusively drink bottled water, saying that local water systems could contain harmful contaminants. Structures in the Upper Kula and Lahaina water systems were destroyed by the fire, which may have caused benzene — a carcinogen — to enter the water system, they said.
The Lahaina fire that has surged through Hawaii is already one of the deadliest in U.S. history, and officials warn the toll is likely to rise. It is the second-deadliest fire in the last 100 years, after the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California that killed 85 people and consumed the town of Paradise.
The Maui wildfires damaged or destroyed thousands of structures and burned more than 2,100 acres, according to the latest assessment from the Pacific Disaster Center.
The research center’s latest update on Friday, shared by Maui County in the early hours of Saturday, said that 2,719 structures were exposed to the fire — more than double their previous estimate — of which more than 2,200 were damaged or destroyed in the flames.
While the Maui fires are not the largest to have hit Hawaii, the loss of life and damage is “definitely the worst,” an expert said. “This was not unprecedented in terms of the size and the conditions, it was just tragic that Lahaina was in the direct path and resources were spread thin across multiple fires on the island,” Clay Trauernicht, a wildfire specialist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, said in an email Friday.
Trauernicht and others working on the issue of wildfires in the state have argued that the decline of large-scale agriculture and ranching in recent decades has led to large swaths of unmanaged land.
“These areas then fill in with nonnative tropical grasses which now surround many, many communities in Hawaii, are highly flammable, highly sensitive to fluctuations in rainfall, wind, and humidity, and create very dangerous conditions for firefighters,” he explained. “This also limits the support that was historically available to help fire response — plantation workers and ranchers maintained roads, water access, and machinery, and knew the land.”
According to Trauernicht, there are groups working to reduce the risk of wildfires, including working with ranchers to encourage targeted grazing, planting trees and other plants to replace the nonnative grasses and restoring wetland Hawaiian agriculture to create fire breaks. “The problem is these efforts are still very small scale, often depending on volunteer and nonprofit support, and so we need to increase the resources available to do these kinds of activities across the landscape.”
A preparatory emergency management plan commissioned by the state of Hawaii last year cast the risk of wildfires to the population as “low.” The “State of Hawai’i Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan — Base Plan,” endorsed by then-Gov. David Ige (D) in February 2022 outlines the risks faced by the islands and their population of some 1.5 million from disasters and hazards, and their preparedness for them. It found the risk of wildfires to people to be “low,” though it classified the risk to property and the environment to be “medium.” Other hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, and cyber threats, were labelled as “high” risk to people.
An expert told The Post this week that, based on weather conditions and a changing climate, the wildfires should have been “predictable.” “Emergency management is a complex, multifaceted discipline that requires a high level of organization and coordination,” the report said. “The state’s relative isolation and dependence on outside imports create planning considerations unique to the state of Hawai’i,” it continued.
"The Department of Health and Human Services on Friday declared a public emergency in the state of Hawaii as it reels under the effects of the deadly wildfires. The decision came a day after President Biden issued a major disaster declaration, and “gives the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) health care providers and suppliers greater flexibility in meeting emergency health needs of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries,” according to an HSS statement.
“We will do all we can to assist Hawaii officials with responding to the health impacts of the wildfires,” HSS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in the statement.
The department has sent a team of 13 to Hawaii, including mortuary specialists and other public health response workers." Some 4,522 people were still without power across Hawaii early Saturday, according to monitoring website PowerOutage.us — though this was a sharp drop from Friday, when nearly 11,000 had no power. The vast majority were on the island of Maui, as authorities there grapple with the ongoing wildfires."
Police are restricting access to West Maui through Ma’alaea and Waihe’e, Maui County said on Friday evening. Vehicles are able to leave Lahaina via the Honoapi’ilani Highway, but the historical town remains barricaded, with authorities warning residents “to stay out of the area due to hazards including toxic particles from smoldering areas. Wearing a mask and gloves is advised.”
Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez (D) announced a comprehensive review into the decisions and policies surrounding the fires that decimated Maui’s historical town of Lahaina and other areas.
“My Department is committed to understanding the decisions that were made before and during the wildfires and to sharing with the public the results of this review,” Lopez said in a statement Friday.
“As we continue to support all aspects of the ongoing relief effort, now is the time to begin this process of understanding.” Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) on Friday responded to reports that sirens failed to warn residents in affected areas, saying that telecommunications lines the sirens relied upon to warn residents in affected areas were “destroyed very rapidly” by the fast-moving flames.
“That communication was cut off by the destruction of essentially 1,000-degree heat that was coming down the mountain,” Green told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Green also described how, early on in the fires, helicopters that spray water to beat back flames were unable to launch due to high winds. “That’s not, again, to make an excuse for anyone, and we’re going to check,” Green added, “but I have to tell you, this is a very fluid situation across the islands.”
In the dark, cold water off Lahaina on Tuesday night, Annelise Cochran clutched one of her neighbors for warmth, both women shivering and struggling to breathe through the smoke and fumes. Cochran felt as though she was losing consciousness. “I don’t know if it was the smoke or the cold or the fumes,” said Cochran, 30.
“It was the closest I’ve felt to death.” Cochran and her neighbor survived the inferno in Lahaina by spending more than five hours in the water next to a rock wall at the edge of town. Another of their neighbors, an 86-year-old man, did not live through the night.
The fire that took the town was swift and brutal. Early that morning, Cochran had seen reports of a wildfire nearby, but that wasn’t unusual for Lahaina, where she has lived for seven years. In the afternoon, the wind whipped up, so strong that Cochran began taking videos of the flying leaves.
When she came out of a shower at around 4 p.m., the smoke was growing thicker, and she began to hear fire alarms in nearby buildings going off. There was no text telling her to evacuate, no emergency siren. Then, to her shock, she saw flames in a parking lot about a block away. She ran to her apartment to grab a few essentials and jumped into her car. She turned down toward the water, hoping to find a way out of town, but the road was blocked by abandoned cars. She picked up a tourist, but he later decided to leave the vehicle. She never saw him again. When the building next to her car began to burn, she headed for the water. She found two of her neighbors, a middle-aged woman named Edna and an 86-year-old man named Freeman, who has difficulty walking.
They all went over the rocky barrier toward the water to escape the flames. They spent hours in the water and on the rocks, trying to stay away from flying embers and noxious fumes, but also moving closer to the flames when they began to feel hypothermic. Cochran saw people grab debris and float off into deeper waters, which horrified her: She works on the ocean and knows the dangers of currents and hypothermia. “People still chose just to drift out,” she said. “I feared for those people’s lives.” The worst part of the ordeal came when cars began to explode, sending toxic fumes and intense heat rolling toward the water.
That’s when Cochran and Edna felt near collapse. The women held each other as they shook and tried to stay awake. They talked about their families and promised each other they’d make it. At one point Cochran called out to Freeman, who was a little farther down the rocky beach, and asked how he was. He just smiled and made a “shaka” gesture with his hand — middle fingers down, thumb and little finger out — to indicate he was all right, even though Cochran knew he was suffering.
Later she saw him slumped against the wall, unmoving. She believes he succumbed to the fumes. “I just ache for his family,” Cochran said. She and several dozen other people were rescued from the water by firefighters around midnight, and she has spent the last few nights at shelters. Her body is covered with bruises and lacerations; her feet and face are burned. “I feel blessed to be alive,” she said.
The death toll from the Hawaii wildfires has risen to 80, Maui county officials said in an update late Friday, as firefighters continued work to contain fires on the island. Government officials are launching a review of the state’s emergency response, as residents criticized relief efforts as insufficient and records indicated that emergency sirens weren’t activated at the state or county level during the wildfires, though alerts were sent to cellphones and broadcast networks. Here’s what to kno
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