Jason Musgrove has spent every single day for the previous two weeks looking for out whether or not his mom is alive or lifeless.

He and his stepfather drive to shelters, clinics and assist distribution websites round Maui, lurching between hope and despair, like a whole bunch of different households nonetheless trying to find kinfolk and pals within the wake of the fires that destroyed the coastal city of Lahaina. Mr. Musgrove asks: Has his mom, Linda Vaikeli, 69, ended up as a Jane Doe in a burn unit? Is she too traumatized to name her household? Why does he nonetheless not have a solution?

The hearth’s official loss of life toll of 115 marks the worst wildfire in additional than a century, however that determine has overshadowed a doubtlessly extra ominous statistic: Roughly 1,000 to 1,100 others are nonetheless listed as unaccounted for, in response to the F.B.I.

They embrace immigrant resort staff who spoke little English, multigenerational households who have been residing in shut quarters when the hearth swept by their houses, residents of homeless encampments, and grandparents who had bother strolling and didn’t use cellphones.

Two days after the fires, the authorities on Maui started registering the names of the lacking and taking DNA from relations to assist determine stays. But households mentioned they’ve obtained virtually no updates and have needed to depend on crowdsourced lists for primary details about who was lacking, or how many individuals have been nonetheless misplaced amid the rubble.

Hawaii’s governor has warned that the loss of life toll would rise considerably. But the variety of confirmed deaths has barely modified for a number of days, at the same time as search groups say that they had completed combing by 87 % of Lahaina’s ash and rubble. This uneven progress has created a determined disconnect between official bulletins and relations’ gnawing fears.

“The numbers are not adding up,” Mr. Musgrove mentioned.

Some households have held out hope that the individuals listed as lacking are nonetheless alive and have been unable to examine in after dropping their cellphones. But kinfolk have began to ponder horrible uncertainties, at the same time as they circle the island and hand out lacking posters.

They surprise: Could their family members have been so obliterated by the hearth that they may by no means be discovered? Could they’ve been swept out to sea after leaping into the Pacific to flee the smoke and flames? Are looking out households silly to nonetheless maintain onto hope?

“I’m going to keep searching,” Mr. Musgrove mentioned Monday afternoon, after one other fruitless hunt. “I only have one opportunity to do this. To find my Mom.”

It can take months and even years of painstaking forensic evaluation and DNA testing to determine the lifeless, as seen after the mass losses of life throughout the Sept. 11 assaults, Hurricane Katrina and infernos just like the one which consumed Paradise, Calif.

“We may not know in the end about everybody,” Steven Merrill, the particular agent accountable for the FBI’s Honolulu area workplace, mentioned at a news convention on Tuesday.

A number of days after the hearth that destroyed Lahaina, anthropologists from California State University, Chico, arrived on Maui to work with search-and-rescue groups to assist determine fragments of bone within the rubble. The course of is a painstaking one with which anthropologists are acquainted from archaeological digs.

By the time they arrived, any our bodies that have been intact and even partly recognizable had already been discovered and positioned in a cell morgue close to the Lahaina Civic Center, in response to Dr. Eric Bartelink, an anthropologist at Chico State. The stays included charred our bodies present in vehicles on Front Street in addition to many our bodies recovered from the ocean, he mentioned.

Dr. Ashley Kendell, who was additionally a part of the workforce from Chico State, mentioned the situations of the stays found in Lahaina have been much like what she discovered whereas working within the aftermath of the 2018 Camp hearth in Northern California.

“In wildfire contexts or really any fire scene, everything is grayscale. Everything looks very, very similar,” she mentioned. “And it really takes a very trained eye to recognize burned bone. So having us on scene helps make those IDs possible. We are very good at locating remains within a debris pile without having to do any excavation or further damage.”

Ultimately, 84 of the 85 victims of the Camp hearth have been recognized after a number of months. Dr. Kendell mentioned she was hopeful for the same lead to Lahaina, however the course of will take at the least a number of months.

This week Tim Laborte was driving round West Maui with a pile of lacking posters, in search of his stepfather and his canine, Haupia, named after a standard Hawaiian coconut dessert. Mr. Laborte mentioned that his hope, nonetheless faint, was being stored alive after a potential sighting of his stepfather.

“We had heard that someone saw him, but we took it with a grain of salt because there are a lot of Filipino guys with dogs,” Mr. Laborte mentioned.

Mr. Laborte has been leaning on a way of equanimity nurtured by his Buddhist religion. “Your time is going to come,” he mentioned. “It’s just a matter of when. It’s inevitable, so it’s nothing really to cling to or worry about. If he’s passed, it’s OK. But if he’s alive, we have to keep looking.”

Dana Condrey determined to fly to Maui after 10 days with out phrase from her 56-year-old brother, Phillip Hudelson, a bartender at Cheeseburger in Paradise, a restaurant that was destroyed within the hearth. Ms. Condrey suspected that her brother would have prevented crowded rescue shelters, so she began driving round to parks, grocery shops and motels, attempting to think about the place he would go. On Monday, she received a cellphone name from a Red Cross employee who had taken her DNA pattern: Mr. Hudelson had been discovered.

After escaping the hearth on his motor scooter, he spent every week sleeping on the seashore and consuming canned soups that he had warmed within the sand. He then checked right into a resort that was offering shelter in Kaanapali to evacuees. He was sunburned and in shock, nonetheless sporting the identical garments from the hearth. But alive.

“We just started crying and embracing,” Ms. Condrey mentioned. “It’s an absolute miracle.”

Such tales proved to Mr. Musgrove that there was nonetheless some hope, nonetheless slim. His mom, who some days might barely carry herself away from bed, had been house alone in her condo the day of the fires, and she or he didn’t name or textual content her husband or different kinfolk, so far as they knew.

But when Mr. Musgrove started sifting by her iCloud information, he discovered 4 blurry images taken at 2:04 p.m. that day. Were the images one other lifeless finish or some signal that she had tried to flee?

“The pictures gave me hope,” he mentioned, nevertheless it was a cautious one. “Am I so desperate that I’m creating this? The smallest things — you grasp onto.”

He puzzles over the photographs now, enjoying with their distinction and hue to seek for some clues. In quieter moments, he and his stepfather share reminiscences of Ms. Vaikeli’s ardour for cake-baking, and hearken to outdated voice mail messages by which Ms. Vaikeli sings Happy Birthday in her Texas twang.

Then they plot the place to look subsequent.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed analysis.