[Source: Reuters]

Hawaii Governor Josh Green on Sunday called a part of the island of Maui that was devastated by wildfires a “war zone,” as the death toll reached 93 and was expected to keep climbing.

A fast-moving blaze engulfed the northwest coast of Maui on Tuesday, levelling the historic resort town of Lahaina and obliterating 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.

Green, who warned on Saturday that the death toll would rise, 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 before their homes were destroyed.

Some people 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.

President Joe Biden on Sunday told reporters asking whether he planned to visit Maui in the coming days, “we’re looking into it.”

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 wildfire since 1918, when 453 people died in the Cloquet fire in Minnesota and Wisconsin, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association.

Officials have secured 1,000 hotel rooms for people who lost their homes and are arranging for rental properties to serve as housing at no cost to families, Green said on Saturday. More than 1,400 people had been taken in at emergency shelters.

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.

FEMA Director Deanne Criswell said the agency had 150 people on the ground, with additional search teams and dogs arriving within a day or two.

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