Maui authorities are dramatically underplaying the number of people known to have died in the inferno that ripped through Lahaina last week – with locals telling DailyMail.com that the actual death toll is at least 480 and that morgues had run out of body bags.
The figure is quadruple that of the official number of 111 – and some of the relatives of the victims have been left to uncover the remains of their loved ones themselves due to the glacial progress of the search and recovery operation.
On Tuesday, Maui mayor Richard Bissen said just 25 percent of the stricken town had been searched, although he expected that figure to increase to 85 percent by Saturday.
But DailyMail.com photos taken on Wednesday showed hundreds of cars and vehicles still unsearched – with just a handful marked with an orange X to show they’d been looked at.
For Allisen Medina, 24, who has lived in Maui for five years and has spent the past two weeks making perilous trips into Lahaina to help burned out residents, that is still too slow.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, she said: ‘People have been doing their own recovery.
‘I know there are at least 480 dead here in Maui and I don’t understand why they’re [the authorities] not saying that. Maybe it’s to do with DNA or something.
‘I do know they ran out of body bags by the first or second night and had to ship some in from the mainland.’ Allisen says the slow recovery process has led to family members being left to find the charred corpses of their loved ones themselves, including a friend of hers who lost four family members.
She told DailyMail.com: ‘I have a personal friend who lost her parents, sister and her 10-year-old nephew. She went in [to Lahaina] and saw them there.’
She added: ‘100 percent not enough is being done so people are doing it themselves. The Government, relief organizations – they’re not doing anything.’
She added: ‘We have the right to know what’s going on. FEMA came here to help with the recovery [process] but we don’t see them. ‘We’re only 100 miles from Oahu which has several military bases. Why is the response so lacking? Why are they doing so little? Why is nothing else being done?’
Allisen also hit out at emergency services boss Herman Andaya who made the decision not to sound Maui’s emergency sirens – telling a press conference that they are associated with tsunamis and not fires.
