As death toll from Maui wildfire reaches 93, effort to find and identify the dead is just beginning

Residents sift through the rubble of a home that was destroyed by wildfire on Aug. 12, 2023 in Kula, Hawaii. (Getty Images/AFP)
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Updated 15 August 2023
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As death toll from Maui wildfire reaches 93, effort to find and identify the dead is just beginning

  • More than 2,200 structures were damaged or destroyed as the fire tore through Lahaina
  • New toll makes the blaze the deadliest in the United States since 1918, when 453 people died in Minnesota and Wisconsin

LAHAINA, Hawaii: As the death toll from a wildfire that razed a historic Maui town climbed to 93, authorities warned that the effort to find and identify the dead was still in its early stages. The blaze is already the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century.
Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3 percent of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said Saturday.
“We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles, and it is full of our loved ones,” he said, noting that the number of dead is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.”
He spoke as federal emergency workers picked through the ashen moonscape left by the fire that razed the centuries-old town of Lahaina. Teams marked the ruins of homes with a bright orange “X” to indicate an initial search, and “HR” when they found human remains.
Pelletier said identifying the dead is challenging because “we pick up the remains and they fall apart.” The remains have been through “a fire that melted metal.” Only two people have been identified so far, he said.
During the search efforts, the barks of cadaver dogs alerting their handlers to potential remains echoed over the hot, colorless landscape.
“It will certainly be the worst natural disaster that Hawaii ever faced,” Gov. Josh Green said as he toured the devastation on historic Front Street. “We can only wait and support those who are living. Our focus now is to reunite people when we can and get them housing and get them health care, and then turn to rebuilding.”
At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed in West Maui, Green said, nearly all of them residential. Across the island, damage was estimated at close to $6 billion.
At least two other fires have been burning on Maui: in south Maui’s Kihei area and in the mountainous, inland communities known as Upcountry. No fatalities have been reported from those blazes.
The Upcountry fire affected 544 structures, most of them homes, Green said.
As many as 4,500 people are in need of shelter, county officials said on Facebook, citing figures from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Pacific Disaster Center.
Pelletier encouraged people with missing family members to go to a family assistance center to take a DNA test.
“We need to identify your loved ones,” Pelletier said.
Those who escaped were thankful to be alive as they mourned those who didn’t make it.
Retired fire captain Geoff Bogar and his friend of 35 years, Franklin Trejos, initially stayed behind to help others in Lahaina and save Bogar’s house. But as the flames moved closer and closer Tuesday afternoon, they knew they had to flee.
Each escaped to his own car. When Bogar’s vehicle wouldn’t start, he broke through a window to get out, then crawled on the ground until a police patrol found him and brought him to a hospital.
Trejos wasn’t as lucky. When Bogar returned the next day, he found the bones of his 68-year-old friend in the back seat of his car, lying on top of the remains of the Bogars’ beloved 3-year-old golden retriever Sam, whom he had tried to protect.
Trejos, a native of Costa Rica, had lived for years with Bogar and his wife, Shannon Weber-Bogar, helping her with her seizures when her husband couldn’t. He filled their lives with love and laughter.
“God took a really good man,” Weber-Bogar said.
The latest death toll surpassed that of the 2018 Camp Fire in northern California, which left 85 dead and destroyed the town of Paradise. A century earlier, the 1918 Cloquet Fire broke out in drought-stricken northern Minnesota and raced through rural communities, destroying thousands of homes and killing hundreds.
The wildfires are Hawaii’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, surpassing a 1960 tsunami that killed 61 people. An even deadlier tsunami in 1946, which killed more than 150 on the Big Island, prompted development of a territory-wide emergency alert system with sirens that are tested monthly.
Hawaii emergency management records do not indicate that the warning sirens sounded before fire hit the town. Officials sent alerts to mobile phones, televisions and radio stations, but widespread power and cellular outages may have limited their reach.
Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, the wildfires on Maui raced through parched brush covering the island.
“It outpaced anything firefighters could have done in the early hours,” US Fire Administrator Lori Moore-Merrell said.
The most serious blaze swept into Lahaina on Tuesday and destroyed nearly every building in the town of 13,000, leaving a grid of gray rubble wedged between the blue ocean and lush green slopes.
Maui water officials warned Lahaina and Kula residents not to drink running water, which may be contaminated even after boiling, and to only take short, lukewarm showers in well-ventilated rooms to avoid possible chemical vapor exposure.
Maui’s firefighting efforts may have been hampered by limited staff and equipment.
Bobby Lee, president of the Hawaii Firefighters Association, said there are no more than 65 county firefighters working at any given time, who are responsible for three islands: Maui, Molokai and Lanai.
Lahaina resident Riley Curran said he doubted that county officials could have done more, given the speed of the flames. He fled his Front Street home after seeing the oncoming fire from the roof of a neighboring building.
“It’s not that people didn’t try to do anything,” Curran said. “The fire went from zero to 100.”
More than a dozen people formed an assembly line on Kaanapali Beach Saturday to unload water, toiletries, batteries and other essentials from a catamaran that sailed from another part of Maui.
David Taylor, marketing director of Kai Kanani Sailing, which owns the boat, said many of the supplies were for hotel employees who lost their homes and were living with their families at their workplaces.
“The aloha still exists,” he said as the group applauded when they finished unloading the boat. “We all feel it really intensely and everybody wants to feel like they can do something.”
Caitlin McKnight, who also volunteered at an emergency shelter at the island’s war memorial, said she tried to be strong for those who lost everything.
“It was evident that those people, those families, people of the Maui ohana, they went through a traumatic event,” McKnight said, using a Hawaiian word for family. “You could just see it in their face.”


Togo ruling party wins sweeping majority in legislative poll, final provisional results show

Updated 9 sec ago
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Togo ruling party wins sweeping majority in legislative poll, final provisional results show

  • The UNIR party's victory follows the approval of controversial constitutional reforms that could extend President Gnassingbe's 19-year rule
  • Under the new charter, the president will be elected by parliament instead of by universal suffrage

LOME: Togo’s ruling party has won 108 out of 113 seats in parliament, according to the final provisional results of last month’s legislative election announced on Friday.
The sweeping majority secured by President Faure Gnassingbe’s UNIR party follows the approval of controversial constitutional reforms by the outgoing parliament that could extend his 19-year rule.
The new charter adopted in March also introduced a parliamentary system of government, meaning the president will be elected by parliament instead of by universal suffrage.
Opposition parties were hoping to gain seats in the April 29 vote to enable them to challenge the UNIR party after they boycotted the last legislative poll and left it effectively in control of parliament.
The election had been delayed twice because of a backlash from some opposition parties who called the constitutional changes a maneuver to allow Gnassingbe to rule for life.
Constitutional amendments unanimously approved in a second parliamentary vote earlier in April shortened presidential terms to four years from five with a two-term limit.
This does not take into account the time already spent in office, which could enable Gnassingbe to stay in power until 2033 if he is re-elected when his mandate expires in 2025.


Anti-war protest ruffles University of Michigan as demonstrations collide with graduation season

Updated 05 May 2024
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Anti-war protest ruffles University of Michigan as demonstrations collide with graduation season

  • Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry
  • Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across campuses nationwide in recent weeks in a student movement unlike any other this century

NEW YORK: Protesters chanted anti-war messages and waved Palestinian flags during the University of Michigan’s commencement Saturday, as student demonstrations against the Israel-Hamas war collided with the annual pomp-and-circumstance of graduation season at American universities.
The protest happened at the beginning of the event at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. About 75 people, many wearing traditional Arabic keffiyeh along with their graduation caps, marched up the main aisle toward the graduation stage.
They chanted “Regents, regents, you can’t hide! You are funding genocide!” while holding signs, including one that read: “No universities left in Gaza.”
Overhead, planes flew competing messages. One read: “Divest from Israel now! Free Palestine!” The other read: “We stand with Israel. Jewish lives matter.”
Officials said no one was arrested, and the protest didn’t seriously interrupt the nearly two-hour event, which was attended by tens of thousands of people, some of them waving Israeli flags.
State police prevented the demonstrators from reaching the stage and university spokesperson Colleen Mastony said public safety personnel escorted the protesters to the rear of the stadium, where they remained through the conclusion of the event.
“Peaceful protests like this have taken place at U-M commencement ceremonies for decades,” she added.
US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro paused a few times during his remarks, saying at one point, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you can please draw your attention back to the podium.”
Before he administered an oath to graduates in the armed forces, Del Toro said they would “protect the freedoms that we so cherish,” including the “right to protest peacefully.”
The university has allowed protesters to set up an encampment on campus but police assisted in breaking up a large gathering at a graduation-related event Friday night, and one person was arrested.
Michigan was among the schools bracing for protests during its commencement ceremonies this weekend, including Indiana University, Ohio State University and Northeastern University in Boston. Many more are slated in the coming weeks.
At Indiana University, protesters were urging supporters to wear their keffiyehs and walk out during remarks by President Pamela Whitten on Saturday evening. The campus in Bloomington, Indiana, has designated a protest zone outside Memorial Stadium, where the ceremony is set to take place.
Tent encampments of protesters calling on universities to stop doing business with Israel or companies they say support the war in Gaza have spread across campuses nationwide in recent weeks in a student movement unlike any other this century. Some schools have reached agreements with the protesters to end the demonstrations and reduce the possibility of disrupting final exams and commencements.
Many encampments have been dismantled and protesters arrested in police crackdowns.
The Associated Press has recorded at least 61 incidents since April 18 where arrests were made at campus protests across the US More than 2,400 people have been arrested on 47 college and university campuses. The figures are based on AP reporting and statements from universities and law enforcement agencies.
At Princeton, in New Jersey, 18 students launched a hunger strike in an effort to push the university to divest from companies tied to Israel.
Senior David Chmielewski, a hunger striker, said in an email Saturday that the latest protest started Friday morning with participants consuming water only.
He said the hunger strike will continue until university administrators meet with students about their demands, which include amnesty from criminal and disciplinary charges for protesters.
Other demonstrators are participating in “solidarity fasts” lasting 24 hours, he said.
Princeton students set up a protest encampment and some held a sit-in at an administrative building this week, leading to about 15 arrests.
Students at other colleges, including Brown and Yale, launched similar hunger strikes earlier this year before the more recent wave of protest encampments.
In other developments Saturday, police broke up a demonstration at the University of Virginia. Campus police called it an “unlawful assembly” in a post on the social platform X.
Footage from WVAW-TV showed police wearing tactical gear removing protesters from an encampment on the Charlottesville campus. Authorities have not said how many people were arrested.
Meanwhile near Boston, students at Tufts University peacefully took down their protest encampment without police intervention Friday night.
Officials with the school in Medford, Massachusetts, said they were pleased with the development, which wasn’t the result of any agreement with protesters. Protest organizers said in a statement that they were “deeply angered and disappointed” that negotiations with the university had failed.
The protests stem from the Israel-Hamas conflict that started on Oct. 7 when Hamas militants attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking roughly 250 hostages.
Vowing to destroy Hamas, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 34,500 Palestinians, around two-thirds of them women and children, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled territory. Israeli strikes have devastated the enclave and displaced most of Gaza’s inhabitants.

 


US blames Rwanda for deadly attack on displaced camp in DR Congo

Updated 05 May 2024
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US blames Rwanda for deadly attack on displaced camp in DR Congo

  • DR Congo government spokesman Patrick Muyaya on Friday had also accused “the Rwandan army and its M23 terrorist supporters” of being responsible in a statement on X, the former Twitter

WASHINGTON: The United States has accused Rwanda of involvement in a deadly attack on a camp for displaced people in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a claim dismissed as “absurd” by Kigali on Saturday.
At least nine people were killed in blasts on Friday in the camp on the outskirts of the city of Goma, local sources said.
“The United States strongly condemns the attack (Friday) from Rwanda Defense Forces and M23 positions on the Mugunga camp for internally displaced persons in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in a statement.
Miller said the United States was “gravely concerned” by the expansion in DR Congo of Rwandan forces and the M23, a mostly Tutsi group that resumed its armed campaign in the vast, long turbulent DR Congo in 2021.
“It is essential that all states respect each other’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and hold accountable all actors for human rights abuses in the conflict in eastern DRC,” he said.
DR Congo government spokesman Patrick Muyaya on Friday had also accused “the Rwandan army and its M23 terrorist supporters” of being responsible in a statement on X, the former Twitter.
Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo described the US comments as “ridiculous,” in a post on X.
“How do you come to this absurd conclusion? The RDF, a professional army, would never attack an IDP camp,” she said.
“Look to the lawless FDLR and Wazalendo supported by the FARDC (the Congolese armed forces), for this kind of atrocity,” she added.
The FDLR, or Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, is an armed ethnic Hutu group operating in Congo’s east for 30 years, while Wazalendo is fighting the M23 alongside the Congolese army.
The origin of Friday’s blasts has not been clearly established.
According to witnesses, government forces positioned near the camp had been bombarding the rebels on hills further west since early morning and, according to a civil society activist, “the M23 retaliated by throwing bombs indiscriminately.”
“Horror in its most serious form! A bomb on civilians, deaths, children! A new war crime,” said the government spokesman Muyaya.
The United States has repeatedly backed Kinshasa’s claims that Rwanda has backed the M23, but Miller’s statement amounts to an unusually direct implication.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron also this week called on Rwanda to end its backing for M23 rebels and withdraw its troops from DR Congo territory.
President Paul Kagame in turn has demanded that the DR Congo act against Hutu forces over ties with the perpetrators of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, which mostly targeted Tutsis.
The United States has repeatedly sought to mediate between the two sides, with intelligence chief Avril Haines in November visiting DR Congo and Rwanda and announcing a pathway to reduce tensions.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken this year met Kagame and voiced hope that Rwanda was willing to engage in diplomacy.
 

 


Netherlands remembers World War Two dead amid tight security due to Gaza war

Updated 04 May 2024
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Netherlands remembers World War Two dead amid tight security due to Gaza war

  • Normally some 20,000 people attend the Dam commemoration
  • Earlier this week municipal authorities announced unprecedented security measures to keep the ceremony safe and avoid possible disruptions linked to the Israel-Hamas war

AMSTERDAM: Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte joined around 4,000 people on Saturday for the country’s annual World War Two remembrance ceremony amid restricted public access and heightened security due to the war in Gaza.
The ceremony on Amsterdam’s central Dam square, with the traditional two minutes of silence at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT) to commemorate the victims of World War Two, passed smoothly despite fears that there might be protests.
Normally some 20,000 people attend the Dam commemoration without having to register. But earlier this week municipal authorities announced unprecedented security measures to keep the ceremony safe and avoid possible disruptions linked to the Israel-Hamas war.
At the opening of a Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam in March, pro-Palestinian protesters opposed to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza set off fireworks and booed Israeli President Isaac Herzog as he arrived on a visit.
Every town and the city in the Netherlands holds its own remembrance ceremony on May 4 and tens of thousands of people attend the events. The Netherlands then marks on May 5 the anniversary of its liberation from Nazi occupation in 1945.


Drone footage shows Ukrainian village battered to ruins as residents flee Russian advance

Updated 04 May 2024
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Drone footage shows Ukrainian village battered to ruins as residents flee Russian advance

  • Residents have scrambled to flee the village, among them a 98-year-old woman who walked almost 10 kilometers (6 miles) alone last week, wearing a pair of slippers and supported by a cane, until she reached Ukrainian front lines

KYIV: The Ukrainian village of Ocheretyne has been battered by fighting, drone footage obtained by The Associated Press shows. The village has been a target for Russian forces in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
Russian troops have been advancing in the area, pounding Kyiv’s depleted, ammunition-deprived forces with artillery, drones and bombs. Ukraine’s military has acknowledged the Russians have gained a “foothold” in Ocheretyne, which had a population of about 3,000 before the war, but says that fighting continues.
Residents have scrambled to flee the village, among them a 98-year-old woman who walked almost 10 kilometers (6 miles) alone last week, wearing a pair of slippers and supported by a cane, until she reached Ukrainian front lines.

FASTFACT

Ukraine’s military has acknowledged the Russians have gained a “foothold” in Ocheretyne, which had a population of about 3,000 before the war, but says that fighting continues.

Not a single person is seen in the footage, and no building in Ocheretyne appears to have been left untouched by the fighting. Most houses, apartment blocks and other buildings look damaged beyond repair, and many houses have been pummeled into piles of wood and bricks. A factory on the outskirts has also been badly damaged.
The footage also shows smoke billowing from several houses, and fires burning in at least two buildings.
Elsewhere, Russia has in recent weeks stepped up attacks on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in an attempt to pummel the region’s energy infrastructure and terrorize its 1.3 million residents.
Four people were wounded and a two-story civilian building was damaged and set ablaze overnight after Russian forces struck Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, with exploding drones, regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said Saturday.
The four, including a 13-year-old, were hurt by falling debris, he said on the Telegram messaging app.
Russian state agency RIA reported Saturday reported that Moscow’s forces struck a drone warehouse in Kharkiv that had been used by Ukrainian troops overnight, citing Sergei Lebedev, described as a coordinator of local pro-Moscow guerrillas. His comments could not be independently verified.
Syniehubov said Russia also bombed Kharkiv on Friday, damaging residential buildings and sparking a fire. An 82-year-old woman died and two men were wounded.
Ukraine’s military said Russia launched a total of 13 Shahed drones at the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions of eastern Ukraine overnight, all of which were shot down by Ukrainian air defenses.