Within a day of Maui County releasing 388 names of people unaccounted for following the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, more than 100 of them or their relatives have come forward to say they’re safe.
Something similar happened after a wildfire in 2018 that killed 85 people and destroyed the town of Paradise, California. Authorities 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, it dropped from 1,300 names to only a dozen.
MalamaKai Watson, 40, was not in Lahaina during the fires but on the other side of the island. With cellphone and internet service disrupted, she understood when she first appeared on a grassroots Facebook list of the missing. But she was quickly listed as found after she was able to get in touch with her loved ones.
Seth Alberico, a soccer coach from California’s Bay Area, said his name and his daughter Kalia's had previously circulated on the unofficial, crowdsourced list, but he didn't realize they were also on the new "verified" list until AP told him.He was staying in a condo on Kaanapali Beach not far from the burn area at the time of the Aug. 8 fire.
Earlier in the week, officials pleaded for relatives of people where were still unaccounted for to come forward and give DNA samples to help identify remains, promising that the samples would not be entered into law enforcement databases or used in any other way. At the time, DNA had been collected from only 104 families, a figure officials described as concerningly low.
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