The death toll from the Maui wildfires reached 93 on Sunday as relatives of the missing frantically searched for signs their loved ones may still be alive. Hawaii Governor Josh Green on Sunday likened the burnt-out city of Lahaina to a "war zone" after the fast-moving blaze engulfed the northwest coast of Maui on Tuesday, leveling much of the historic resort town and scorching nearly everything in its path. Days after the inferno, crews of firefighters were still battling flare-ups, and cadaver dogs were sifting through the town's charred ruins in search of victims as survivors and officials grappled with the scale of the disaster. "Right now, we are still in the throes of the acute phase of this recovery, meaning that we're still recovering the tragic loss of life," Green told MSNBC on Sunday. "We're at 93 (victims) now ... it's a war zone, but the help is incredible." Green again vowed to investigate the response to the blaze and the emergency notification systems after some residents questioned whether more could have been done to warn them. Some witnesses said they had little warning, describing their terror as the blaze destroyed the town around them in what seemed to be a matter of minutes. Others dove into the Pacific Ocean to escape. Sirens stationed around the island, intended to warn of impending natural disasters, never sounded, and widespread power and cellular outages hampered other forms of alerts. "We'll know soon whether or not they did enough to get those sirens going," Green said in the TV interview. President Joe Biden on Sunday told reporters asking whether he planned to visit Maui in the coming days, "we're looking into it." While sometimes uplifting to the victims, presidential visits place a burden on recovery efforts with their logistical and security needs. The death toll made the blaze Hawaii's worst natural disaster, surpassing a tsunami that killed 61 people in 1960, a year after Hawaii became a U.S. state. The death toll also exceeded that of the 2018 fire in the town of Paradise, California, in which 86 people perished, and was the highest from a U.S. wildfire since 1918, when 453 people died in the Cloquet fire in Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association.

Source: Agence Tunis Afrique Presse