Woman Loses All Belongings In Maui Fire, Stranger Finds Her 1 Photo On A Beach Miles Away

A woman named Aubrey Vailoces lost her home and all of her possessions in the Maui wildfires that have left nearly 100 people dead and thousands displaced. However, a stranger found a photograph of Mrs Vailoces on an island beach miles away.

The picture shows Mrs Vailoces at her high school graduation with her late great-grandmother, reported Good Morning America. The photo was found on the beach of Lanai, a small Hawaiian island.

In an interview with the media outlet, Mrs Vailoces said, "[The photo] got burned on the side, but my face and her face are just perfect. It wasn't even ruined"

She added, "I don't know if it flew to Lana'i or it went through the ocean tide, no idea, but somehow it made it. It's just like a glimpse of hope."

The 36-year-old said the photo is the only thing she has left from her home, which she shares with her partner and three daughters and her mother.

She revealed that the whole family was at their home in Lahaina when the fire started. The family jumped in their car and drove to Mrs Vailoces' partner's parents, who were out of town.

"We didn't take anything," Vailoces said of their rush to evacuate, which she said happened as she was breastfeeding her youngest child. "I didn't have any slippers. I was just in my nursing bra and underwear."

She said that the next day she heard that her house is completely ashes.

"My great-grandmother ... raised me from the Philippines when my parents were working here in the States," Vailoces said. "She composed this thick album of every birthday, graduation and hospital pictures and whatnot ... and that was the very last page of the album because that's when I graduated high school and I was about to move to America with my parents."

The number of people known to have died in the horrific wildfire that levelled a Hawaiian town reached 106 on Tuesday, authorities said, as a makeshift morgue was expanded to deal with the tragedy, AFP reported.

Maui County officials updated the death toll to 106 on Tuesday, with Green saying earlier that over a quarter of the disaster zone had been searched by dogs trained to sniff for bodies.