President Joe Biden said Tuesday he will travel to Hawaii as soon as possible to assess recovery efforts from the deadliest U.S. wildfires in more than a century.
“A whole city destroyed. Generations of native Hawaiian history turned into ruin,” Biden said in Milwaukee after touring Ingeteam, a clean energy manufacturing company that produces onshore wind turbine generators.
Biden’s comments were his first on the wildfires since the number of fatalities surpassed over the weekend. those from a 2018 fire in California.
Now at 99, the death toll could double or even triple, Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said Monday.
Some Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, had criticized Biden for not publicly addressing the growing tragedy over the weekend, following his initial comments last week.
Before delivering his scheduled remarks on his economic policies Tuesday, Biden talked about the difficult work being done while bodies are still being recovered on Maui.
“All that area they’ve got to plow up, they can’t do it now because they don’t know how many bodies there are,” he said. “They don’t know what’s left.”
Biden said he and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Hawaii “as soon as we can” without disrupting recovery efforts to make sure the state has everything it needs.
More than a dozen federal agencies and departments are involved in the response. Nearly 500 federal employees have deployed to Maui to assist residents.
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