Wildfires at Hawaii’s Maui island have killed at least 67 people with an unleashing destruction on the resort town of Lahaina, an area that draws two million tourists each year, or about 80 percent of the island’s visitors.
As per officials, more than 1,700 buildings are believed to have been affected by the fires, fuelled by high winds caused in part by Hurricane Dora moving hundreds of kilometres to the south of the island state of the United States.
The fires have become the deadliest natural disaster in Hawaii’s history, surpassing that of a tsunami that killed 61 people on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1960, a year after Hawaii joined the United States.
Maui County officials said in an online statement that firefighters continued to battle the blaze, which was not yet fully contained and the residents of Lahaina were being allowed to return home for the first time to assess the damage.
In recent weeks, another massive blaze in Rhodes led to the evacuation of thousands of people. Additionally, thousands of penguins and fish were found dead in Texas- underscoring the urgency of addressing climate change that has reached on it’s critical juncture.