Hawaii wildfires: Why it may take years to identify victims

Bernd Debusmann Jr
BBC Washington correspondent

August 16, 2023

A man with a shovel stands on a large pile of debris in the ruins of a house — image caption:On August 11, a man searched for his son's remains in the rubble.

Nearly a week after a devastating wildfire ripped through Maui, the true death toll is still unknown.

Relatives of about 1,300 missing people were waiting anxiously, while cadaver dogs were searching the disaster area that had been burned black.

The confirmed death toll stands at 101 and is expected to continue to rise. Hawaii Governor Josh Green said on Monday (August 14) that it could take up to 10 days to get an accurate number, and that investigators are finding “probably about 10 to 20 people a day until the mission is over.”

As of August 15, only three bodies had been identified, according to Adam Weintraub, communications director for the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency.

Victim identification experts told the BBC it could take months or even years to match the names of the remaining victims on Maui.

Given the extent of the destruction, and the state in which many of the remains are likely to be, both finding and identifying the victims will be a daunting task – one that emergency workers also described as “requiring a great deal of luck”.

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Video caption:Maui County, Hawaii, USA, was hit hard by wildfires, and many towns and cities have lost contact with the outside world. The BBC followed the volunteers who were transporting relief supplies by boat into the disaster area.

Maui County Police Chief John Pelletier described the harsh conditions on the ground Monday, telling reporters: “When you take your clothes off, it's not just dust that's on it, it's our loved ones.”

“The complicated part is the collection,” said Daniele Podini, an associate professor of forensic molecular biology at George Washington University.

“Finding the right samples, identifying relatives, building a database of all the relatives of missing persons, and then comparing the sample results with the database… it's a combination of everything.”

Chris Milroy, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Ottawa, said that in Hawaii's case, many scientific operations may be complicated by the extent of the damage in the area.

“You might not be able to get your dental records because of the fire and the disruption to civil services. Some records might have been destroyed in the fire,” said Milroy, who has worked on forensic investigations with British police and war crimes investigators in the Balkans. “So for a lot of people this approach might not be feasible.”

He also said the heat could destroy some victims’ fingerprints, as well as any documents that could allow investigators to match a person to a medical device, such as an artificial hip or pacemaker, and various items that could be sampled for DNA.

“Your main concern is probably DNA,” he said, “but you also need people to compare it to. Even then, there might be a situation where, for example, both brothers are dead. You can prove they are related, but you have no way of knowing for sure which brother is which unless you have other circumstantial evidence.”

Identification by visual identification by relatives is considered unreliable, as is identification through personal items such as bags or wallets found near the remains.

“The problem is that objects can be mixed up, and remains can be fragments,” Milroy said. “And because most people (the remains) are likely to be burned, there could be a relative who walks in and is so devastated by the process that they say yes, but it's not true. So the scientific method is a better option.”

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Video caption:Search and rescue operations are ongoing after the fire on Maui Island in Hawaii, USA. According to statistics from the Maui Police Department, as of August 14 local time, the fire has caused at least 99 deaths.

Specially trained cadaver dogs play a key role in the search. These dogs can navigate the rubble without causing more damage and use their keen sense of smell to find human remains – including those that have been burned to ash and are difficult to detect with the naked eye.

Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has sent 20 additional cadaver dogs to the area, the hours they can work each day are limited due to high temperatures and the need for rest periods.

While Hawaii faces daunting challenges, long delays in identifying victims are not uncommon after fires and other disasters.

For example, after the 24-story Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, it took investigators about five months to identify all 72 people who died in the residential building. After visible remains were removed from the scene, investigators began using small towels and mesh filters to look for smaller, harder-to-identify fragments of human remains.

In the United States, the identification of human remains recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York after the September 11 attacks in 2001 is still ongoing. About 40% of the remains of the victims have not yet been identified.

Mike Marciano, a forensic scientist at Syracuse University in New York, said federal and other state resources are likely to be useful in the Hawaii investigation.

This could include help from the US Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, which is often responsible for identifying remains of service members dating back to World War II and has an $80m (£628,000) facility at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on the neighbouring island of Oahu.

Even so, it will still be a slow process, he said.

“It’s going to be a lot longer than a few weeks,” he said. “I’d say a few months, but it all depends on resources.”