"THE GRAVEST JOB" - IDENTIFYING THE DEAD IN NEW ORLEANS

[powergirl]

The link contains the the entire article. Someone will burn in hell for this.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/09/03/dead/index.html

The corpses floating in the tepid waters that flooded New Orleans will be grotesquely decomposed and difficult to identify, say mass-fatality experts. The macabre process of finding and identifying the dead, which may not begin for three weeks, presents the experts with a challenge as daunting as the one in New York after 9/11 and Southeast Asia after the tsunami.

"The bodies will be essentially unidentifiable," says Barbara Butcher, director of medical legal investigations at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York. "The heat and water will result in decomposition after only two or three days."


What will the bodies look like? "You don't want to know," says Butcher, who worked to identify victims at Ground Zero and in Southeast Asia. "It is really, really awful." Because fingerprints will be obliterated, officials may have to extract DNA from deep bone tissue to identify victims. "All I can say is this is going to be a very unique challenge," Butcher says. She is headed to the Gulf Coast soon.

Nobody knows how many corpses are floating in the streets of New Orleans or scattered across the broader disaster zone. Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said Friday that while he is not basing his estimate on any official count, the total number of deaths in Louisiana "will start at 10,000." New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said earlier this week that there are a "significant number of dead bodies in the water," that "most likely" number in the thousands.

:cry: