Maui wildfires updates: President Biden, first lady tour damage

Brigadier General Steve Logan, the commander of Joint Task Force Five-O, told reporters Friday that the military’s involvement in Lahaina will likely be a "multi-year operation" covering several phases.

A small team of U.S. Dept. of Defense anthropologists arrived to help with the recovery and identification of remains, he said.

Logan emphasized that military are there to augment the large interagency team of local and federal agencies recovering remains.

“Those remains once recovered, are then taken to the local county morgue for further and subsequent testing," he said.

Logan said the first phase will be to remove all of the decedents from the area, then declare the area safe from hazards such as electrical lines.

"And then the phase after that will be to open it up to the families to be able to come back to where their land is and look for any kind of valuables or something of sentimental value or something that they need to get out of there," he said.

-ABC News' Luis Martinez

Officials have been referring families with missing loved ones to Maui Emergency Management Agency, which has not released an official number of missing or list of the names.

Maui Police Chief John Pelletier said they are considering those who are missing "unaccounted for."

"We're going to get everybody that's unaccounted for to the best of our ability accounted for," he told reporters earlier this week. "But I can't promise that we're gonna get them all. And I don't think that's fair to ask that."

One team of volunteers is behind the Maui Fires People Locator, a spreadsheet that is so widely used that a QR code for it is posted all over the island. The Google document has received so much traffic that the volunteers urge people to refrain from viewing it unless they are looking for a specific loved one.

The document lists more than 950 people as currently "not located." The group told ABC News that as more people gain access to communications, many have realized they were on the list as "not located" and self-reported that they are found.

Another group of volunteers is tracking people who were unhoused prior to the fires in a spreadsheet titled Lahaina Unsheltered Missing Persons Search. That effort is led by Maui Rescue Mission Outreach workers, who are also updating their numbers to the Maui Fires People Locator.

Click here to read more.

-ABC News' Meredith Deliso

The number of fire survivors in congregate shelters has been cut in half as officials move more people into stable housing, and the Red Cross anticipates all residents still in shelters will be relocated to hotels by next week, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Over 1,000 federal responders, including 350 search and rescue team members and K-9 teams, have been deployed to Hawaii, according to FEMA.

-ABC News' Anne Flaherty

The fire that ripped through Lahaina moved so quickly that there was little chance for those fleeing to outrun it, an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency told ABC News.

"This fire was moving like a freight train," John Mills, an agency spokesperson, told ABC News' Whit Johnson on "Good Morning America" on Friday.

Mills added, "People could not drive fast enough to outrun it, much less run fast enough. They sought shelter anywhere they could."