850 people missing after Maui wildfires: mayor

There are 850 people still missing since the Maui wildfires burned the resort city of Lahaina to the ground and killed at least 114, officials said.

Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said in a briefing Monday that the FBI and local authorities finished compiling a list of the missing after checking on more than 2,000 names in the two weeks since the blaze.

“To the tireless work of the FBI and the Maui Police Department, over 1,285 individuals have been located safe,” he said. “We are both saddened and relieved about these numbers as we continue the recovery process.”

When discussing the dead, Bissen confirmed that at least 27 of the victims have been identified, with 11 families notified.

He noted that law enforcement and the coroner’s office continue to face the hard labor of identifying the dead through their charred remains.

Bissen also echoed law enforcement in urging those with immediate family members who are missing to provide DNA samples to help assist in identifying them.

The county and FBI have opened a Family Assistance Center just north of the destroyed city on Kohea Kai Drive for families to provide the samples.

Bissen added that the latest numbers continue to be provisional as cell phone service is restored on the island and helping more and more people connect with their missing loved ones.

The government’s estimate notably exceeds that of the “Maui Fires People Finder” spreadsheet, a tool created by locals to list those who have been found and still missing in order to bring some kind of comfort to desperate families.

As of Monday morning, the “Maui Fires People Finder” lists 798 people still missing.

But while more people are located safely as the days go by, more bodies continue to turn up every day as FEMA’s human remains dogs search the city ruins.

Most of the recovered bodies that have been found thus far are “partial remains,” not whole charred corpses — making them impossible to spot by just the naked human eye.

Officials said that as of Monday, 85% of the search area has been combed through, suggesting that the death toll will not significantly spike once the task is completed.

Dr. Robert Mann, a leading forensic anthropologist called to help in Maui, told KOHN 2 the identification process for the dead “could be days if you’re lucky, it could be weeks, it could be months or it could even be a few years.”

The expert likened the painstaking process to his work helping to identify the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

“They still are finding and identifying victims from the Twin Towers,” he noted.