The Deadly Wildfires devastating maui has now killed at least 36 people. Their bodies discovered in the ruins of the raging inferno. Officials held a News Conference just a short time ago. Primary focus is to save lives. Prevent Human Suffering and mitigate property loss. That is what the counties were and are doing. What we do anticipate is additional requests and were already providing support for trying to get the communications back up, water distribution. Were hearing they may need more Law Enforcement official for federal and state Law Enforcement. So were working through that. The damage to the infrastructure, it is not just buildings, i mean these were Small Businesses that invested in maui. These were local residents and we need to figure out a way to help a lot of people in the next several years. School was destroyed. Many of the businesses, a church was destroyed. It will take years. Devastation was most serious in the town of lahaina, a tourist and economic hub with 9,000
Be alive even as their hometown and its history has changed forever. it is like straight out of a movie. i don t wish this on anyone. just please pray for lahaina. reporter: and big factor in the devastation and perhaps in the high death toll has been the high winds across hawaii. i want to bring in general fer gray, she is joining us live from the cnn weather center. we heard about the high winds from hurricane dora. explain to us the connection with what is happening on the ground and how the high winds could be complicating and worsening wildfires? definitely the high winds that attributed to the spread of these wildfires. it was a very rare unfortunate perfect scenario, if you will, that set up around maui with two different systems that influence the winds. and we ll get to those. of course tuesday night these were the pictures that we saw. we originally thought it was just trees burning for the most part and then with the light of day we saw that it was actually lahaina t
Strong ocean currents could have pulled the debris pretty far from now. january fer gray is live in the weather center with more on that and the conditions in that search region. good morning. good morning. that s right. we re looking at conditions to begin to deteriorate as we go through the next 24 to 48 hours. this red box is where the search area is. you can see throughout most of the day they had clear skies but conditions will start to deteriorate just as i mentioned. we are going to see a front very close to the area. and you can see a small band of rain. and this is sunday 8:30 eastern time. so that would be 8:30 p.m. along with this rain comes very strong winds. and so it just adds insult to injury. we re going to see the winds increase possibly 40 to 50 miles per hour. you can expect the seas will begin to get very, very rough as we go through the latter part of sunday. also the main concern are these currents. we ve been talking about these for the past couple of days. the