Pain, anger as Hawaii fire toll reaches 93

LAHAINA, Hawaii — Anger was growing over the official response to a horrific inferno that leveled a Hawaiian town in the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than 100 years.

The death toll from the Maui wildfires reached 93 on Saturday, according to Maui County's website.

More than 2,200 structures were damaged or destroyed as the fire tore through Lahaina, on the island of Maui, according to official estimates, wreaking $5.5 billion in damage and leaving thousands homeless.

Hawaiian authorities have begun an investigation into the handling of the fire, with residents saying there had been no warning.

"The mountain behind us caught on fire and nobody told us jack,"Agence France-Presse quoted Vilma Reed, 63, as saying.

"You know when we found that there was a fire? When it was across the street from us."

Reed, whose house was destroyed by the blaze, said she was now dependent on handouts and the kindness of strangers.

"This is my home now," Reed said, gesturing to the car she has been sleeping in with her daughter, grandson and two cats.

Lahaina, a town of more than 12,000 and the former home of the Hawaiian royal family, has been reduced to ruins, its lively hotels and restaurants turned to ashes.

A banyan tree at the center of the community for 150 years has been scarred by the flames but still stands upright, its branches denuded and its sooty trunk transformed into an awkward skeleton.

The death toll makes the blaze the deadliest in the US since 1918 when 453 people died in Minnesota and Wisconsin, said the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit research group in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The death toll surpassed 2018's Camp Fire in California, which virtually wiped the small town of Paradise off the map and killed 86 people.

Hawaii congresswoman Jill Tokuda told CNN that officials had been taken by surprise by the disaster."We underestimated the lethality, the quickness of fire."

Maui's fires follow other extreme weather events in North America this summer, with record-breaking wildfires still burning across Canada and a major heat wave baking the US southwest.

For many who fled the flames, the misery was compounded on Saturday as they were prevented from returning to their homes.

Some residents waited at a roadblock for hours hoping to be allowed in to look for missing pets or loved ones. Then abruptly the way was blocked, NBC News reported.

Agencies Via Xinhua