2023-08-13 10:25:31
At least 93 people died in the fires that ravaged Maui, an island in the Hawaiian archipelago, according to a new assessment of the disaster whose management is bitterly criticized.
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Maui County announced this new assessment on Saturday evening (Sunday in GMT time, Hawaii being on the GMT-10 time zone), well beyond the human consequences of the last major natural disaster in this American state, the 1960 tsunami which killed 61 people on the island of Hawaii.
The residents, still in shock, began to see the extent of the damage in Lahaina, a seaside town of 13,000 inhabitants almost reduced to nothing.
“It took everything, everything! It breaks my heart, ”laments Anthony Garcia, 80, who has lived in the city for thirty years.
Around, the survivors stir the ashes in the hope of finding photos or objects.
A majestic banyan tree, a tourist attraction, was licked by the flames, but seems to have survived. It stands, now solitary, among the ruins.
Like the inhabitants, justice seeks to understand how the drama could take such proportions: an investigation has been opened into the management of the crisis by the authorities.
Maui suffered numerous power outages during the crisis and the 911 emergency number stopped working in parts of the island, while fire alarm sirens were not activated.
The alerts, usually transmitted by telephone, could not be received, because “there was no network” and “clearly, we did not provide emergency solutions to ensure the safety of the inhabitants”, has admitted Saturday Jill Tokuda, an elected Democrat from Hawaii.
“We underestimated the dangerousness and the speed of the fire,” she regretted.
The island has probably not finished counting its dead. Only a small portion of the burnt area has been searched, according to Police Chief John Pelletier.
And only two victims of this blaze, which melted the metal objects, could be identified, he also said.
The United States had not seen such deadly fires since “Camp Fire”, a blaze in California that destroyed the small town of Paradise and killed 86 people in 2018.
$5.52 billion
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 fire was “incredibly devastating,” according to Jeremy Greenberg, a Fema official interviewed on MSNBC. “These types of fires can spread a distance equivalent to an American football field in 20 seconds or less.”
Firefighters had to battle multiple simultaneous blazes fueled by strong winds, themselves fueled by the force of Hurricane Dora.
Faced with the speed of the progression of the flames, and a fire “as intense as hell”, according to a survivor, Ekolu Brayden Hoapili, the population of Lahaina had to flee without looking back, sometimes even throwing themselves into the ocean. to escape.
Saturday evening the firefighters continued to fight against another fire in a mountainous region of the island.
This disaster comes amid a summer marked by a series of extreme weather events across the planet, including an intense heat wave in the southern United States and mega wildfires in Canada, phenomena linked to global warming according to experts.
They have spread all the more easily since the western part of Maui, where Lahaina is located, is currently experiencing a “severe” to “moderate” drought, according to the US Drought Monitor.
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