These blazes of exceptional intensity and speed killed 93 people. A figure destined to increase, because only a small part of the burnt area could be excavated. “None of us yet knows the magnitude” of the disaster, acknowledged John Pelletier, Maui’s police chief.
The flames reduced the seaside town of Lahaina to ashes, swallowing houses, cars, hotels or businesses. Their heat was so strong that the bodies found are difficult to identify, explained Mr. Pelletier. So far, only two have been able to.
The fire “even melted the metal,” said the police chief, calling on relatives of missing persons to submit to a DNA test to help identify the victims.
No alerts
The circumstances of these dazzling fires, the cause of which is not yet known, remain unclear. In any case, they took the inhabitants by surprise, which many blame the authorities for. “Do you want to know when we knew there was a fire? When it arrived in front of the house”, was annoyed with AFP, Vilma Reed. “The mountain was burning behind us and we were told damn it!”
Like many residents, she received neither alert nor evacuation order, due to a series of anomalies. The powerful sirens, used in particular for tsunamis, remained silent. Nobody knows if it was a technical failure or a decision of the operators.
Official alerts on television and radio were out of reach for residents without electricity. Finally, the telephones, precious relays of information for the authorities in these crises, could not help, for lack of a network. According to residents, the warning usually sent in the event of a weather danger or an abduction alert did not sound on their devices.
“No one saw it coming. That’s all”
An investigation has been opened by the Attorney General into the circumstances of the fire, including the decisions taken by the authorities. Hawaii Congresswoman Jill Tokuda has already admitted that the authorities had “underestimated the danger and the speed of the fire”.
Mazie Hirono, Democratic Senator for the archipelago, said on CNN that she did not want to “seek to find excuses for this tragedy”. “Nobody saw it coming. That’s all,” said police officer John Pelletier.
Many factors contributed to the extreme dangerousness of these fires, for example the presence of plants that burn very easily, a hurricane in the southwest of the island of Maui which fed very violent winds, or an abnormally dry winter.
A reconstruction of 5.52 billion dollars
On the spot, the population already wants to think about the future, and is busy in the middle of the debris to clean up or find snippets of their lives, spared by the flames. Some 2,207 buildings, mostly residential, were destroyed or damaged, according to the federal agency responsible for responding to natural disasters (Fema).
For the Lahaina fire alone, the cost of reconstruction is estimated at $5.52 billion. The reconstruction will probably take “years”, warned Mazie Hirono.
This disaster comes in the middle of a summer marked by a series of extreme weather events around the planet, including an intense heat wave in the southern United States and mega forest fires in Canada, phenomena linked to global warming. according to experts.