Death toll from Maui wildfire reaches 89, making it the deadliest in the US in more than 100 years: Live updates
What is the deadliest wildfire in US history?
The Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin started on Oct 8, 1871, and killed 1,152, according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).
At the time, Peshtigo was permanent home to about 2,000 people, although its population swelled with immigrants looking for work in the lumbering, manufacturing and railroad industries.
The town was surrounded by pine forest, all of its structures were made of wood, including its pavements. Sawdust from the town’s woodworking factory – the largest in the world – covered everything.
On Oct 8, 1871, following a dry winter, spring and summer, the town was a particularly vulnerable when a low-pressure system kicked up a strong wind and transformed a nearby brushfire into a conflagration, which survivors described as a wall of fire that consumed the settlement within minutes, according to the Peshtigo Historical Society.
How many died in the Cloquet and great Hinckley fires?
The Maui wildfire is the deadliest since the Cloquet fire in Minnesota in October 1918, when railroad sparks ignited a wildfire that raged for more than four days, decimating the northern part of the state, according to the Library of Congress.
The NFPA set a death toll of 453 as a result of what is known today as the Cloquet/Moose Lake fires.
Minnesota saw another deadly blaze in 1894, amid conditions strikingly similar to the Peshtigo fire 23 years earlier. A breeze had kicked up and transformed several small, scattered fires near a cluster of logging communities into a wall of flame that destroyed Hinckley, Mission Creek, Sandstone, Miller, Partridge and Pokegama, according to the Hinckley government website.
The fire consumed 400 square miles and killed 418 people.
Topic: The death toll from Maui's fire is no where close to MN & WI fires but still sad (Read 484 times)