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Identifying Hurricane Dead Poses Unusually Daunting Challenges
By Shaila Dewan, The New York Times
September 12, 2005
Faced with the loss of dental records, the rapid decomposition of bodies in this hot coastal environment and the vast destruction of personal possessions, public health officials face a difficult, if not insurmountable, task in identifying the countless dead from Hurricane Katrina.
In fact, experts say, many of the advances in forensic science developed in the aftermath, exactly four years ago, of the nation's last calamitous loss of life are likely to be of little help in the circumstances of this storm, leaving many officials worrying over how many of the dead will remain nameless, and for how long.
"We're in a whole new realm of experience here," said Ricardo Zuniga, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's mortuary team. "People expect quick answers based on the paradigm they're used to. But this is not TV."
Some of the problems existed well before the storm plowed ashore. Louisiana and Mississippi are among the states with the lowest percentage of residents going to the dentist, for example, making it harder for officials to use that extremely reliable form of identification.
The storm itself caused plenty of problems as well, from the destruction of dental and medical records that did exist to the wide dispersal of family members who could provide DNA samples, photographs or basic information.
The task has been made more difficult by what some have criticized as a slow retrieval effort, with bodies in easily accessible, and visible, locations remaining there for days. Coroners have said that even the bodies of people they knew personally were unrecognizable by the time they were collected.
"The ability to capture useful information from that body diminishes week to week," said Terry M. Edwards, the commander of the morgue operations in St. Gabriel, La., run by the Disaster Mortuary Operations Response Team, a division of
FEMA.
Workers from Kenyon Worldwide Emergency Services, a company contracted to retrieve bodies, reached Louisiana at the beginning of September but then awaited instructions from FEMA for several days, said Bill Berry, a spokesman for the company.
"I don't know how fast things could have gone, but it's going well now," Mr. Berry said Saturday, adding that in the three days that the crews had been working at full strength they had recovered every body whose location had been provided by search and rescue teams.
In response to questions about the rate of recovery, Mr. Zuniga said that resources had first been directed toward rescuing the living and were only now being refocused on collecting the dead.
The slow pace of retrieval partly explains the relatively low death toll so far. As of Sunday, the number of confirmed deaths stood at 214 in Mississippi and 197 in Louisiana, although officials say it will be far higher when the final count is made.
Last week, emergency management officials said that the final number in New Orleans would be well below a prediction by the mayor, C. Ray Nagin, that as many as 10,000 could have perished. But the news is not all good - FEMA is on the brink of setting up a second morgue in St. Gabriel, Mr. Zuniga said. The state is also looking for a place to bury even temporarily those remains not immediately identified.
Bob Johannessen, the chief spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said a toll-free number had been set up for families to call if they had relatives feared dead. "It's a place for the process to start, to work through the grief of beginning the long road of possible identification," he said, adding that if bodies were buried and later identified, they would be exhumed and returned to families.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the problems confronting forensic scientists had to do primarily with the condition of the remains, which were desiccated or pulverized by fire and falling buildings, making it difficult to extract testable DNA. In other words, the challenge lay in collecting post-mortem information - body parts and fragments. Of the 2,749 people missing, 1,594 were identified by the office of the chief medical examiner in New York, or 58 percent.
Working with commercial laboratories, the medical examiner's office developed ways to test smaller and more degraded pieces of DNA than were commonly used before.
With Hurricane Katrina, such methods will not be necessary in most cases because the bodies are intact. Far more formidable is the problem of collecting antemortem data - the dental records, photographs, fingerprints and DNA that will be compared to the bodies themselves. After Sept. 11, families were asked to bring in toothbrushes or other personal items that bore the DNA of the deceased. Hurricane Katrina has destroyed or contaminated many of those items, making it necessary to take cheek swabs from blood relatives to get a DNA sample. The more family members, and the closer the relation, the more reliable the tests will be.
In Mississippi, the forensic dentists on the federal mortuary team have already identified dental offices on the coast that are still open and begun calling them to explain what they will be looking for, said Warren Tewes, a member of the team.
Edna Hall, who manages her grandson's dental office in Gulfport, Miss., said she had gotten a call from a FEMA dentist explaining that they would be asking for records and that the federal health privacy law did not apply. Ms. Hall said that although the office had lost its roof, X-rays kept inside filing cabinets were mostly dry and intact. But, she said, she knew of at least two other dentists' offices that had been destroyed.
That is not to say that the condition of bodies that have been submerged in water or trapped in hot attics for days will not compromise identification efforts. While cold water can slow decomposition, warm water accelerates it, experts say. After rigor mortis comes bloat and putrefaction, which can deteriorate some forms of DNA, making it necessary to use less exacting test methods. The next stage of decomposition, in which soft tissue liquefies, happens more rapidly in water.
After a week or more, bodies in water lose their skin and with it any fingerprints, tattoos or other distinct marks, said Lawrence Kobilinsky, a professor of forensic science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. The environmental conditions of the Katrina floodwaters will only make the problem worse, Dr. Kobilinsky said, estimating that 20 percent of the bodies may never be identified.
"You have incredibly large amounts of micro-organisms in the water and reptiles, snakes, fish, that are all going to accelerate the decomposition rate," he said.
Still, in Mississippi, 46 of 161 bodies from the coastal counties have already been identified at the FEMA morgue.
In Louisiana, the bodies that have been identified, said Mr. Johannessen, were primarily hospital or nursing home patients whose identities were printed on bracelets or were otherwise easy to determine.
In other cases, however, officials said that knowing the address where a body was found or finding a driver's license might not be sufficient to make an identification.
In Louisiana, the FEMA morgue is not making identifications or performing autopsies, both of which are the responsibility of the parish coroners, Mr. Johannessen said. The morgue is taking fingerprints, dental X-rays and photographs of bodies, as well as collecting any personal items found with them, to be used for later identification. Mr. Edwards, the morgue commander, declined to talk about the conditions of the bodies that had reached the morgue, which can handle 140 bodies a day.
The state's crime laboratories have taken charge of DNA identifications, said Ray Wickenheiser, the director of the Acadiana Crime Lab in New Iberia, La. He said a flow chart had been devised, beginning with the simplest means of visual identifications and going up through fingerprints, dental X-rays and pacemaker serial numbers to the most rarefied forms of DNA matching. "By the time we're done, we're going to try every possible means to identify them," Mr. Wickenheiser said.
"The big challenge is going to be getting those samples to compare," he said. "When the next of kin have been so widely dispersed, to try to now bring those people together, get the samples together from the next of kin, even find out who's missing - the tasks are going to be monumental."
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