The death toll from the wildfires in Hawaii, the deadliest in more than a century in the United States, has risen to 101, the archipelago’s governor said Tuesday.
“We are saddened to have suffered such a loss,” Josh Green said in a televised statement, adding that rescue teams had only finished searching just over a quarter of the affected area for bodies.
The governor of Hawaii also warned that the works could be affected by storms, with rain and strong winds forecast for the weekend.
Authorities are considering whether or not to “preemptively suspend [as operações] for a short period of time because now all the infrastructure is weaker,” Green said.
On Monday, the governor had already admitted to the CNN television network that the number of fatalities could double, since 1,300 people were still missing.
According to the governor, most of the bodies found to date are found near the coastline or in the ocean. Dozens of people jumped into the water to escape the flames.
In an update on Tuesday, authorities explained that only four bodies had been identified so far.
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier has renewed an appeal for relatives of missing people to take a DNA test to help identify the bodies.
A mobile morgue dispatched by federal authorities arrived in Hawaii on Tuesday, along with a team of medical examiners, pathologists and technicians, to help authorities identify the remains.
During the fires, official announcements on television, radio and mobile phones proved useless for many inhabitants without electricity or the electrical grid. The alarm sirens remained silent.
An investigation was opened to analyze the management of the crisis.
The Hawaii court received a class action lawsuit accusing the largest electricity distributor in the archipelago, Hawaiian Electric, of having caused the fires by leaving power lines operational “during anticipated conditions of high fire risk.”
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, said Tuesday that he intends to visit Hawaii “as soon as possible”, at a time when the fatalities of the fires in that US state are still being counted.
“My wife Jill [Biden] and I will go to Hawaii as soon as possible (…) I want to make sure that we do not stop relief operations, ”said Joe Biden on a visit to the state of Wisconsin.
Last week, Joe Biden declared a state of catastrophe, allowing federal aid to be released to the North American archipelago to fund emergency relief and reconstruction efforts on the island.
Source: TSF
