Leshia Wright heard the crackle of the fast-moving inferno closing in on her home in Lahaina and decided it was time to evacuate.

The 66-year-old grabbed her medication for a pulmonary disease and her passport and fled the subdivision in the historic Hawaii oceanside community just minutes before flames engulfed the neighborhood. Hours later, she called family members and told them she slept in her car.

Then her phone went dead…

With the death toll from the Maui wildfires reaching 93 early on Sunday, governor Josh Green has labeled it the “worst natural disaster that Hawaii ever faced”.

The scale of the damage came into sharper focus on Saturday, four days after a fast-moving blaze leveled the historic resort town of Lahaina, obliterating buildings and melting cars.

Expressing shock over the scale of devastation, Mr Green said: “We can only wait and support those who are living. Our focus now is to reunite people when we can and get them housing and get them healthcare, and then turn to rebuilding.”

In the hours before a wildfire engulfed the town of Lahaina, Maui County officials failed to activate sirens that would have warned the entire population of the approaching flames and instead relied on a series of sometimes confusing social media posts that reached a much smaller audience.

Power and cellular outages for residents further stymied communication efforts. Radio reports were scarce, some survivors reported, even as the blaze began to consume the town. Road blocks then forced fleeing drivers onto one narrow downtown street, creating a bottleneck that was quickly surrounded by flames on all sides.

The death toll from the devastating wildfires in Hawaii has reached 93.

Maui County announced the updated fatality figures for its island on Sunday morning.

Jason Momoa has issued a stern message to holidaymakers hoping to still travel to Maui amid the fatal wildfires.

Two days after sharing his “heartbreak” about the wildfires that have devastated the Hawaiian island, Momoa shared a post stating: “Maui is not the place to have your vacation right now. DO NOT TRAVEL TO MAUI.”

Jacob Stolworthy reports.

Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks has posted a lengthy tribute on Instagram to Lahaina, the Maui town worst-affected by the ongoing wildfires.

Nicks wrote that she owns a house on Maui a short distance from the town, and called Lahaina “the most magical place on earth”.

She captioned the tribute: “Lahaina is not gone ~ It is just away.”

Efforts to assess the full impact of the wildfires to Hawaii are still in their early stages, officials there warned on Saturday, even as the death toll rose to 89.

The fire that razed the historic Maui town of Lahaina is already the deadliest in the US for more than a century.

Crews with cadaver dogs have covered just 3 per cent of the search area, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said. “We’ve got an area that we have to contain that is at least 5 square miles and it is full of our loved ones. And we’ve got 89 so far. Today we identified two,” noting that the death toll is likely to grow and “none of us really know the size of it yet.” He spoke as federal emergency workers picked through an ashen moonscape left by the fire. Teams marked the ruins of homes in Lahaina with a bright orange X for an initial search and HR when they found human remains.

Pelletier said that identifying the dead is extremely challenging because “we pick up the remains and they fall apart… When we find our family and our friends, the remains that we’re finding is through a fire that melted metal”. Dogs worked the rubble, and their occasional bark — used to alert their handlers to a possible corpse — echoed over the hot and colorless landscape. “It will certainly be the worst natural disaster that Hawaii ever faced,” Governor Josh Green remarked Saturday as he toured the devastation on historic Front Street.

“We can only wait and support those who are living. Our focus now is to reunite people when we can and get them housing and get them health care, and then turn to rebuilding.”