Understand Why 15 Days After the Fire In Hawaii, 850 People Are Still Missing | world

On August 8, a fire broke out in the city of Lahaina, on the island of Maui, in the state of Hawaii, in the United States, and after 15 days, 850 people are still missing, according to County Sheriff Richard Besen. Shelter.

The figure is an estimate, but the FBI and the Red Cross put together a list of names, which was already much larger – in the days immediately following the fire, about 2,000 people were missing. According to US media, some of the people on this list did not tell anyone about their destination because they are tourists and have returned home or homeless people who do not have a large list of contacts and it is difficult to locate them.

According to the Hawaii Emergency Agency, as the communications infrastructure was affected by the fire, the task of finding people became more complicated.

Mobile phone service has returned to work in the affected areas, making it easier to find about 1,200 people.

Identification of the dead

As of Tuesday (22), 114 deaths have been confirmed, but among these deaths there are many people who have not been identified.

A makeshift morgue has been set up on Maui where a team of pathologists, X-ray technicians, fingerprint specialists and forensic dentists are working.

The US government has 10 teams of these professionals who are called upon when disaster strikes. These groups are called the Mortuary Disaster Operational Response Team (DMORT).

Part of the cremated corpses has not been identified, and professionals are trying to do so using the materials they have.

The team is considered experienced, but identification is particularly difficult – in some cases, almost all of the remains have been consumed by fire.

The work is divided into two parts (the names are in Latin): “post-mortem”, which consists of analyzing the remains of the dead, and “ante-mortem”, which is the collection of information from relatives of missing persons.

On-site rescue teams transfer human remains daily to the temporary morgue.

These remains undergo various examinations. Experts are trying to find out if the DNA in this material is compatible with the DNA of relatives who are searching for the missing persons.

It is particularly difficult to identify fire victims, as many of them have no other DNA material to test and no records of their teeth.

The fire in Maui is an “open disaster”, because the number of victims is unknown and there is prior information on identities (as happens in an airplane disaster, for example).