I agree with you that there will be a good estimate, but I also agree with your post higher up that data from a disaster is always going to be messy, sadly.
Yeah, the official death toll for 9/11 was cut by something like 40% when the New York Times did a series where they wrote a small obituary for every person who died in the event. They didn’t find as many deaths as the official count, when they actually researched each death. Presumably, they mostly removed duplicates.
Cleaning up that kind of data takes a huge effort.
Interesting instance of a house surviving in the middle of burned ones, possibly helped by Two Weird Tricks:
Jeez, the comments after that article. SMH 
It’s interesting that of the four elements that might be the reasons behind the survival of that house:
-
Non-flammable roof (metal instead of asphalt)
-
No-vegetation zone around the house (homeowner’s motivation was termite prevention!)
-
Policing/removal of combustible material from near the house (cleaning up the junk under the deck)
-
Isolation (buffered by a vacant lot, a road, and the ocean, so only one close by source of fire)
1-3 were all put forward as zoning policies by the fire department for Paradise, CA in the aftermath of the Camp fire. They were all soundly defeated in the face of strident community opposition, because…freedom.
Watching the video recordings of people evacuating in their cars it is clear that once the fire got going, there was no stopping it, not with the constant gale force winds plus the fire made its own wind on top of that. The embers flew far and wide sparking multiple new fires. If you happened to have had your own fire hose hooked to a hydrant for just such an occasion (and water pressure) maybe.
A terrifying fire struck Maui in 2018. Officials were warned of a repeat.
Totally incompetent local government.
The death toll in the Lāhainā wildfire has grown to 115 with approximately 850 people still unaccounted for, Maui officials confirmed.
Frick’in A! That’s an understatement. With something this big this time with so many lives lost, I think they will have a harder time sweeping things under the rug with “yeah, we’ll look into that suggestion - don’t worry your pretty little head” (the county government didn’t really say that, but their comments in 2018 suggest that attitude).
The Hill 23-Aug 2023
Maui residents who disobeyed barricade survived fires: AP
-
In the early hours of the Maui fires, there were more than 30 power poles downed alongside the Honoapiilani Highway at the south end of Lahaina — a historic town that was decimated in the fires earlier this month. Officials closed Lahaina Bypass Road due to the fires, blocking the only way out of Lahaina to the southern part of the island.
-
Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said during a news conference that officers never stopped people from leaving the area, but the AP report suggests that residents were discouraged from disobeying the barricade.
-
One family swerved around the barricade set up to escape the flames, while another resident took a dirt road uphill to climb above the fire, according to the AP. However, many others who stayed in the cars on that road were stuck in a gridlock, with fires surrounding them on most sides with the ocean on the remaining side.
This morning I read all of the Maui emergency management personnel were on another island that day for a training exercise. Can’t make this stuff up.
The great majority of comments seem to be rational and non-conspiratorial. My opinion of Post readers has gone up a notch.
Fox commenters are a different story…
I think there is a growing consensus on this and the lawsuits will bankrupt the company.
That’s what has happened to PG&E here in California after decades of neglecting their own equipment, which caused several deadly and destructive fires. They reorganized and now they are in a years-long process of burying (“undergrounding”) their power lines in high-risk areas. The article mentions this. They also have a process for shutting off the power in areas under certain conditions. All of this should have been done in Maui, and with any utility after PG&E was sued into bankruptcy. Either they weren’t paying attention or were just lazy.
Otherwise known as negligence or recklessness.
Down from 115. It seems that in some instances, forensic examiners determined that they had multiple sets of remains for the same person and sixteen of the remains that investigators had received were nonhuman.