Maui authorities say more than 800 people remain unaccounted for two weeks after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century destroyed the community of Lahaina.
“I probably had, at any given time, 10 to 15 detectives who were assigned to nothing but trying to account for people who were unaccounted for,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said in a phone interview. “At one point the local editor of our newspaper … said, ‘Hey, if you give me the names, I will print them.’ And at that point it was like, ‘Absolutely. Anything that we can do to help out.’”
There are also widely varying accounts of the tally of the missing. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Sunday on the CBS News show “Face the Nation” that more than 1,000 remained unaccounted for. Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said in a pre-recorded video on Instagram that the number was 850. And duringon Monday, White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall put it between 500 and 800.
To find people, the organization cross-checks names with emergency shelter registration lists, calls hospitals to see if the person was admitted as a patient and combs through social media, among other steps, Parra said. When an individual is located, the organization provides their status to the person seeking information about them — with the individual’s consent — and closes the case in its system.
Babrauskas added that damage from debris removal and excavation can also make recovery efforts difficult. “We had this Excel spreadsheet with the people’s names and any of the different information we had,” he said. “We’d then start working the cases similar to the way you work any other case to try to locate somebody.”
“There are so many of those who won’t have that ending. I don’t know how we come back from that,” Ferguson said.
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