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From the November 2005 Anthropology News
Identifying Victims after a Disaster
Dick Gould
Brown U
After Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast I was deployed to the area for 17 days by the national Disaster Mortuary Operations Team (DMORT). The first week I volunteered identifying victims in Gulfport, Mississippi. The remaining time I assisted recovering human remains from hospitals, nursing homes and schools in New Orleans and St Bernard Parish. In New Orleans we recovered 48 victims at Memorial Hospital, mainly elders.
Many responders to the disaster, such as myself, are still coming up for air. At the same time, the aftermath of Katrina—both the long recovery process and our analyses of the event—has only just begun. And while it is too soon to come to any conclusions about the role of anthropology in responding to the hurricane, one thing is obvious: anthropologists will continue to become an increasingly important part of major disaster recovery operations.
Disaster Anthropology
Anthropologists join funeral directors, medical examiners, coroners, pathologists, medical records technicians and transcribers, finger print specialists, forensic odontologists, dental assistants, x-ray technicians, mental health specialists, computer professionals, administrative support staff and security and investigative personnel in volunteering with DMORT. As part of its national response plan to disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Administration calls on DMORT to identify victims and provide assistance to families. Since 1996 when Congress passed the Family Assistance Act, this humanitarian role of forensics and DMORT has continued to become central to the work of identifying victims of disasters. The Family Assistance Act was passed in response to families who had lost loved ones in airline incidents. These families testified they had received inadequate treatment, often left wondering the fate of those they lost. The act requires all public and private entities operating in the US to have a plan to assist families, in part by providing them with the information to help them grieve, in the event of a disaster.
Many DMORT volunteers have years of experience in rapidly responding to disasters. Gina Hart, a forensic anthropologist from the New Jersey State Medical Examiner’s Office, was a well of expertise in Gulfport, drawing from her past work for the UN in identifying victims of ethnic violence and human rights abuses in Bosnia. Forensic work is based on a powerful method: comparing pre- and post- mortem data to identify a person. The resulting information not only assists families, but it constitutes evidence that can later be used in a court case. In Gulfport we had our challenges, largely, because like in Bosnia and other areas torn by disaster, there was little ante- mortem data available to us. Dental records were destroyed by the storm, or perhaps never even existed.
Before the processing of human remains can begin, or the forensic work, the remains must first be recovered from the field. It is in this role that the importance of archaeology is emerging. I often joke that I am an archaeologist pretending to be a forensic anthropologist. There is some truth to this. Yet, the need for archaeologists in recovering field remains and helping to carefully record the scene where remains are found cannot be ignored. An archaeologist’s questions about the linking of material remains to a carefully documented field site can only strengthen the work of accurately and rapidly identifying remains. As insurance claims are processed and the question is asked—was it the storm, flood or something else that killed this person—carefully recorded details of the scene are vital, along with the careful treatment of the recovered remains.
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| Workers look over records at the temporary morgue for Hurricane Katrina victims on October 14, 2005, in St Gabriel, Louisiana. Louisiana State Medical Examiner Louis Cataldie explained to the public the methods medical examiners use to identify Katrina victims, including DNA comparison and fingerprinting process. Photo courtesy of Chris Graythen/Getty Images |
Standards of Evidence
All forensic investigations share similar standards of evidence. They all assume that evidence recovered at a crime or disaster scene must be documented and maintained under control from the point of collection to the courtroom or to the medical examiner’s office in an unbroken evidentiary chain. This is usually referred to as the “chain of custody” (or “chain of evidence”). Evidence collected in this way for medical and legal purposes must be able to withstand challenges in the court of law, which may be very different from a scholarly context or what can be called the “court of history.”
Although forensic anthropology is a profession of long-standing, the role of forensic anthropologists has been expanding dramatically since the World Trade Center disaster in 2001. Since Sept 11, not only have queries about forensics as a profession increased, but the scope of anthropological investigations and recoveries has shifted into the realm of humanitarianism—especially at mass-fatality disaster scenes. Prior to Sept 11 the focus of forensics was largely in terms of investigation, or providing evidence for courts of law, rather than its humanitarian role in assisting grieving families.
Forensic anthropology, or the “CSI model” after the popular television program, has been applied, for example, for decades to standard crime-scene investigations, often involving the FBI or Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Human rights archaeologists have played a major role in investigating the fate of “disappeared” individuals in places like Argentina or Guatemala or assisting the UN to identify victims of genocide in places like Rwanda or Bosnia. Primarily these efforts have aimed to provide evidence of atrocities for tribunals of leaders who ordered mass killings.
Since the mid-1980s, US-government sponsored teams involving trained archaeologists and anthropologists have ventured into remote areas, especially in Asia and the Pacific. The teams deployed by the US Army Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command locate, document and recover the remains of US military personnel who were missing in action during past conflicts. Once identified, these remains and personal effects are repatriated to their families whenever possible.
Forensic science, of course, has proved valuable in the more traditional archaeological arena of human history and prehistory, where issues such as ancient cannibalism among Indians of the American Southwest and the events surrounding the Battle of the Little Bighorn have been studied in detail. Human osteology has always been an essential part of research and teaching in the evolution of human origins and in biocultural anthropology, and it shares many of the same principles with forensic anthropology. Indeed, focusing on empirical evidence in both the courts of history—where anthropological and archaeological theory provide frameworks for interpretation—and law—where evidence must be tightly linked to claims of guilt or innocence—can only strengthen the general standards of archaeology and anthropology in all realms.
Balancing Act
The aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster was perhaps the most painful period in the history of New York City. To say that it was a “life-changing experience” now seems trite, but it was. Forensic anthropologists volunteering with DMORT conducted round-the-clock operations near the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) to identify victims. This was a daunting task. There were extraordinary amounts of fragmented and commingled human remains.
It was also apparent that large amounts of fragmented human remains were scattered over wide areas of lower Manhattan beyond Ground Zero, and much of this was lost during the city cleanup. There was clearly a need for trained field teams of archaeologists to work in these areas to recover remains, personal effects, office documents, and other materials in a forensically controlled manner. This did not happen, however, until a trial recovery excavation a few months later under an invitation from the OCME demonstrated that such recoveries were possible. This volunteer team of field archaeologists, Providence Police and other members of the Rhode Island community, known as Forensic Archaeology Recovery (FAR), continues to train regularly and to deploy as needed. Arguably, so much vital evidence was lost outside Ground Zero that the number of WTC victims identified so far from human remains stands at just under 60%. For archaeologists and forensic anthropologists, the World Trade Center was one of the first “wake-up” calls that there was a need to strengthen the field recovery remains as a first step in identifying victims.
A year after this trial effort, a terrible fire destroyed “The Station” nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, killing 100 people and leaving over twice as many horribly burned or injured. Although small compared with the WTC, the aftermath was similar in its effects. Rhode Island is a small community, and many people who have lived here for a while had close ties with the fire victims. Once again, DMORT assisted the local authorities—in this case the State Medical Examiner’s Office—with the result that all of the fire victims were identified within three days. This was my first deployment with DMORT, and as a learning experience it was like drinking from a fire hose. Then FAR was called to “The Station” site by the Rhode Island State Fire Marshal’s Office and performed forensic recoveries there for the next 11 days, finally closing the site.
In this case, FAR’s primary task was to recover personal effects and enter them in custody to go to the Medical Examiner’s lab for eventual repatriation to the victims’ families. Another equally important task, however, was to “clean up” the site. The Fire Marshal explained that after the police lines and fences come down after a major fire, people swarm over the site collecting everything they can find—including human remains. It may be hard to imagine, but it happens. We agreed that we would not let it happen in this case, and by the end of the operation nothing of that nature was left there for people to collect. This was a service to our community that we had never envisioned beforehand, but it demonstrated the value of controlled forensic archaeology at a disaster scene in a way that had major, positive effects within our community.
The experiences of major disasters in the scope of Sept 11, “The Station” nightclub fire and Hurricane Katrina have shown us that disaster anthropology is as much a humanitarian mission as it is an exercise of anthropologists’ professional and academic skills. Those of us who participate in this work train like maniacs to prepare for the very thing we dread most, but when it happens we would not want to be anywhere else.
Richard Gould has been attempting to understand human adaptive responses to stress in different ways since the mid-1960s, first with Aborigines in Australia’s arid zone, then with maritime cultures of the recent past, and currently in the context of mass-fatality disasters.
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