Identifying Hurricane Dead Poses Unusually Daunting Challenges

By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: September 12, 2005

BATON ROUGE, La., Sept. 11 - 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.

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