Family and friends mobilized on social media, asking for help in locating missing loved ones
\n HAWAII
\nThe death toll from the Maui wildfires reached 96 on Sunday as relatives of the missing frantically searched for signs their loved ones may still be alive, while survivors grappled with the scale of the disaster and sought solace at church services.
\nDays after the inferno destroyed much of the historic resort town of Lahaina on Tuesday and Wednesday, crews of firefighters were still battling flare-ups, and cadaver dogs were sifting through the town\u2019s charred ruins in search of victims.
\nThe death toll made the blaze Hawaii\u2019s worst natural disaster, surpassing a tsunami that killed 61 people in 1960, a year after Hawaii became a U.S. state.
\nIt was also the largest number of deaths 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.
\nMany of the survivors took to Sunday church services, including Akanesi Vaa, 38, who said her family got stuck in traffic while trying to escape the flames.
\nVaa, her husband and her children aged 15, 13 and 9 fled on foot and jumped a fence to safety. Along the way, an elderly woman pleading for help handed her a baby to care for. The woman and her husband also made it over the fence.
\n\u201cI think a lot of us needed to hear today\u2019s message,\u201d Vaa said after attending church at King\u2019s Cathedral in Kahului.
\n\u201cAll these ashes are going to turn into beauty. I know Lahaina will come back ten times stronger.\u201d
\nScott Landis, pastor at Keawal\u2019i Church, a United Church of Christ congregation in Makena, said an unusually large crowd of 100 showed, nearly double what he would have expected on a typical Sunday in August.
\n\u201cThey were really listening. You could tell people were here, looking for a word of hope,\u201d Landis said.
\nAmong them were people with family and friends unaccounted for, and \u201cfearing the worst\u201d he added.
\nPeople sifted through a crowd-sourced online database listing thousands of names of individuals who had been found, as well as of those who remained unaccounted for.
\nHawaii Governor Josh Green warned at a press conference on Saturday the death toll would continue to climb as more victims were discovered. Dogs trained to detect bodies have covered only 3% of the search area, Maui County Police Chief John Pelletier said.
\nFamily and friends mobilized on social media, asking for help in locating missing loved ones.
\n\u201cStill searching for my in-laws,\u201d Heather Baylosis wrote in a Saturday Instagram post. \u201cPeople are being found alive and severely disoriented due to what they have gone through. We are holding out hope!\u201d
\nMegan Sweeting wrote on her Facebook page, \u201cMISSING: My Dad, Michael Misaka, has been missing since the Lahaina Fires started. If there is any information out there regarding my dad please let me know. I just need to know he is safe.\u201d
\nHundreds remained missing, though a precise count was unclear.
\nHawaii Governor Green 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.
\nSome witnesses said they had little warning, describing their terror as the blaze destroyed the town around them in what seemed like minutes. Others dove into the Pacific Ocean to escape.
\nSirens stationed around the island, intended to warn of impending natural disasters, never sounded, and widespread power and cellular outages hampered other forms of alerts.
\n\u201cWe\u2019ll know soon whether or not they did enough to get those sirens going,\u201d Green told MSNBC.
\nThe cost to rebuild Lahaina was estimated at $5.5 billion, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), with more than 2,200 structures damaged or destroyed and more than 2,100 acres (850 hectares) burned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Family and friends mobilized on social media, asking for help in locating missing loved ones HAWAII The death toll from the Maui wildfires reached 96 on Sunday as relatives of the missing frantically searched for signs their loved ones may still be alive, while survivors grappled with the scale of the disaster and sought solace […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349301,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-349273","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n