KAHULUI, Aug 12 (Reuters) - The death toll from the Maui wildfires is now at 89, officials said on Saturday, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.
The scale of the damage came into sharper focus on Saturday, as search teams with cadaver dogs sifted through the ruins of Lahaina, four days after a fast-moving blaze leveled the historic resort town, obliterating buildings and melting cars.
The 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.
Governor Josh Green warned at a news conference on Saturday afternoon that the death toll would continue to rise as more bodies were discovered.
Officials vowed to examine the state's emergency notification systems after some residents questioned whether more could have been done to warn people before the fire overtook their homes. Some were forced to wade 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.
The state's attorney general, Anne Lopez, said she was launching a review of the decision-making both before and during the fire, while Green told CNN he had authorized a review of the emergency response.
Local officials have described a nightmarish confluence of factors, including communications network failures, powerful wind gusts from an offshore hurricane and a separate wildfire dozens of miles away, that made it nearly impossible to coordinate in real time with the emergency management agencies that would typically issue warnings and evacuation orders.
The death toll made the inferno, which erupted on Tuesday, Hawaii's worst natural disaster in history, surpassing a tsunami that killed 61 people in 1960, a year after Hawaii became a U.S. state.
The latest death toll exceeded the 85 people who perished in a 2018 fire in the town of Paradise, California, and was the highest toll from a wildfire since 1918, when the Cloquet fire in Minnesota and Wisconsin claimed 453 lives.
