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17-08-2023
HAWAII: The number of people known to have died in the horrific wildfire that levelled a Hawaiian town reached 107 on Tuesday, authorities said, as a makeshift morgue was expanded to deal with the tragedy.
State governor Josh Green has repeatedly warned that the final toll from last week’s inferno in Lahaina already the deadliest US wildfire in over a century would grow significantly, urging Hawaiians to gird for a number that could be two or three times its present level.
Maui County officials updated the death toll to 107 on Tuesday, with Green saying earlier that over a quarter of the disaster zone had been searched by dogs trained to sniff for bodies.
Refrigerated containers were being pressed into use as makeshift morgues at the Maui Police Forensic Facility on Tuesday, a journalist observed, as the largely rural island struggled to cope with the sheer number of dead.
Green warned against any attempt at a land grab in the devastated remains of Lahaina, as locals fret that deep-pocketed developers might take advantage of people’s desperation and try to buy up plots that can be turned into luxury housing or more lucrative short-term rentals.
“Our goal is to have a local commitment forever to this community, as we rebuild,” he said.
“So we will be making sure that we do all that we can to prevent that land from falling into the hands of people from the outside.”
The difficult process of identifying the dead inched forwards on Tuesday, with officials saying they had collected DNA samples from 41 people whose relatives were missing.
Only five of the dead have been identified so far, with officials from Maui County releasing two of the names after notifying their families.
“We offer our deepest condolences to the families who are beginning to receive notifications about their loved ones,” Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said in a statement.
The island’s police chief has said that many of the bodies are so badly charred that they are unrecognizable, such was the ferocity of the blaze. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
