Maui confronts the challenge of finding more than 800 missing people after the deadly wildfires

Something similar happened after a wildfire in 2018 that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, California. Authorities in Butte County, home to Paradise, ultimately published a list of the missing in the local newspaper, a decision that helped identify scores of people who had made it out alive but were listed as missing. Within a month, the list dropped from 1,300 names to only a dozen.

There are also widely varying accounts of the tally of the missing. Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Sunday on the CBS News show “Face the Nation" that more than 1,000 remained unaccounted for. Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said in a pre-recorded video on Instagram that the number was 850. And during President Joe Biden's tour of the devastation on Monday, White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall put it between 500 and 800.

To find people, the organization cross-checks names with emergency shelter registration lists, calls hospitals to see if the person was admitted as a patient and combs through social media, among other steps, Parra said. When an individual is located, the organization provides their status to the person seeking information about them — with the individual’s consent — and closes the case in its system.

Babrauskas added that damage from debris removal and excavation can also make recovery efforts difficult. “We had this Excel spreadsheet with the people’s names and any of the different information we had,” he said. “We’d then start working the cases similar to the way you work any other case to try to locate somebody.”

“There are so many of those who won’t have that ending. I don’t know how we come back from that,” Ferguson said.

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