WAILUKU >> As teams of cadaver dogs continue their painstaking search for human remains among the ashes and debris from last week’s Lahaina wildlife, a contingent of federal mortuary experts has been deployed to Maui along with a mobile morgue that arrived Tuesday to assist in the equally meticulous task of processing the dead to identify those who perished.

Maui County on Tuesday raised the death toll from the Aug. 8 catastrophe to 106 — seven more than the previous day’s total — with hundreds more unaccounted for. Officials warn the number of fatalities will increase significantly since only about a third of the 5-square-mile impact area has been examined by the 20 specially trained dogs and their handlers, members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Urban Search & Rescue Task Force.

A Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team and victim identification experts also have been dispatched to Maui, to augment state and county mortuary resources, according to Jonathan Greene, deputy assistant secretary and director of the Office of Response at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The team includes coroners, pathologists, X-ray and lab technicians, and other staff, Greene said in a conference call Tuesday with the media. The 22-1/2 tons of equipment and supplies that arrived includes examination tables and X-ray and lab equipment.

He said a victim identification team will be working at the county’s Family Assistance Center, open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Kahului Community Center, where families have been providing information on loved ones who are unaccounted for and submitting DNA swabs to help identify fire victims.

Federal DMORT teams have responded to numerous natural disasters, including hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and the Haiti earthquakes, and have assisted the National Transportation Safety Board at major transportation incidents.

“It’s going to be a very, very difficult mission,” Greene said of the Lahaina disaster, “and patience will be incredibly important because of the number of victims.”

The Maui Police Department on Tuesday released the first two names of those killed in the Lahaina wildfire: Lahaina residents Robert Dyckman, 74, and Buddy Jantoc, 79. MPD said three other individuals have been identified but their families had yet to be notified.

Earlier in the day, police said 13 DNA profiles had been obtained from victims and 41 DNA samples had been obtained from family members of missing people.

The Lahaina wildfire is the deadliest such U.S. natural disaster in more than a century, surpassing the 85 known fatalities from the 2018 Camp fire in Northern California that destroyed the town of Paradise.

According to media reports at the time, making positive identifications of those who died in the Camp fire was exceedingly difficult. Many were burned beyond recognition, with only individual bones or fragments remaining. Identification by dental records was not always possible because dentist offices in town were wiped out in the fire along with nearly everything else.

The scarcity of remains and the prolonged, intense heat to which the victims were exposed also complicated DNA analysis in some cases. Lacking such evidence, investigators often have to rely on circumstantial information such as where the victim was found and their estimated age and sex, not always making for reliable identification.

Although Maui County officials have talked of finding victims whose remains were reduced to ash in the Lahaina firestorm, recovery teams likely are uncovering bodies in various states, according to Dr. Robert Mann, an anatomy and pathology professor at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine. Those with minimal burns generally are the first to be identified, he said, as was the case with the first Lahaina wildfire victims who were identified through fingerprints.

“My expectation is that you’re going to go from complete or nearly complete bodies to just fragmentary remains,” Mann said.

The pathologist worked for 23 years with the Department of Defense’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command’s Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii and before that with the Smithsonian Institution. He helped identify victims at such mass-casualty events as the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 1997 crash of a Korean Air flight on Guam, and assisted with the investigation into Jeffrey Dahmer and other serial killers.

He said using fingerprints and dental records are usually the first steps toward identifying victims, but records for comparison aren’t always available. Other clues can be found in tattoos, pacemakers or other medical implants, and prior broken bones.

“There are a lot of things we can use,” he said.

However, DNA analysis cannot always be counted on as a last resort, according to Mann. He said extreme heat breaks down DNA molecules, so even if traces remain, “those strings of DNA are broken up, so you can’t bring them back together again.”

“But again there is the hope that new technology and developments can correct that and fill in the gap for those cases,” he said. “Some IDs can be done in a matter of hours, days or a few weeks. Others take weeks, months and years.”

Mann recalled his own experiences at the military identification lab in the early 1990s before DNA testing was widely used, and how in a matter of two short years once the technique was accepted, they were suddenly able to identify bone fragments the size of a fingernail that were collected decades earlier. He said even Civil War remains have now been identified through DNA.

“One of the most important things we can ever do is hold hope that identification is going to be made,” Mann said.

While understanding the agony families face while waiting for final word on a loved one, “the thing we really have to make sure we never do is make a misidentification, and the way you don’t make a misidentification is to do things correctly. And doing it right, unfortunately, takes time.”

MISSING OHANA

>> The Family Assistance Center at the Kahului Community Center, 275 Uhu St., is open daily from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. for family members searching for missing loved ones and to submit DNA samples for identification.

>> The American Red Cross set up a hotline at 800-733-2767 for people trying to locate loved ones.