Church Says Five Latter-day Saints Among Maui Wildfire Dead as Toll Reaches 93

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has confirmed that five of its members are among those killed in the wildfires on Maui, Hawaii, as the island's death toll continues to rise.

The church said four of the five belonged to the same family. It offered no further information about the victims or how they died.

The church also said it is using two meetinghouses, in the Kahului and Kahului West Stakes, as temporary shelters for people affected by the fires. "Latter-day Saint families are opening their homes to people displaced by the wildfires," it said in a news release.

The confirmation came as the number of confirmed deaths from the blaze that destroyed a historic Maui town reached 93 on Sunday. Authorities cautioned that the work of finding and identifying the dead remains at an early stage. The fire is already the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century.

Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said on Saturday that crews with cadaver dogs had covered only 3% of the search area.

The need for shelter is also large. County officials said on Facebook that as many as 4,500 people require housing, citing figures from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Pacific Disaster Center.

The fires are the deadliest natural disaster in Hawaii in decades, surpassing a 1960 tsunami that killed 61 people. An even deadlier tsunami in 1946, which killed more than 150 people on the Big Island, led to the creation of a territory-wide emergency alert system with sirens that are tested monthly.

A dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane fed the fires, which spread quickly through the parched brush that covers the island.

The most serious blaze reached Lahaina on Tuesday and destroyed nearly every building in the town of 13,000 people. What remains is a grid of gray rubble set between the blue ocean and green slopes.