Jan-Feb 2001  

 

DMORT National Commander’s Column
By Thomas J. Shepardson

 

This newsletter brings us some very sad news.  Captain William Tyler, of the Office of Emergency Preparedness and the U.S. Public Health Service Uniformed Corps, has retired. Many of you who have been on a deployment have experienced the warm and caring individual that Bill is.  He has dedicated his life with DMORT to make sure that the integrity of our operations is maintained without compromise and he has ensured that the respect and dignity of not only the victims of a disaster but also their families is maintained.  He has been one of the driving forces behind the growth of DMORT.

 

Bill has accepted a position with Abbott Pharmaceutical Company in the Chicago, Illinois area.  We all wish Bill and his family much success in his new endeavor.  The following was engraved on a plaque that DMORT was privileged to present to Captain Tyler at his retirement party in Washington on Friday, February 23, 2001.  “National Disaster Medical System DMORT teams gratefully acknowledge the integrity and compassion of a true leader and friend, Captain William Tyler.  You have always insured, with the highest of standards, the dignity and respect of your fellow Americans in time of tragedy.  You will forever be held, with the highest of honor, in all out hearts.”

 

In the month of January DMORT was invited to participate in a planning session sponsored by the National Institute of Justice.  The purpose of the session was to discuss the need to develop a manual for all police, coroner and medical examiner offices that would answer questions should a mass fatality incident happen within their jurisdiction.  This manual would be distributed free of charge, by the Department of Justice, when completed, to all of these agencies in the United States.  The manual will be very similar to the “Crime Scene Investigation,” “Fire and Arson Scene Evidence’” and “Guide for Explosion and Bomb Scene Investigation” that they have previously printed.  All of the participants agreed that this was a very much needed publication, and we, as DMORT, were very honored to be asked to participate.  The next meeting of the group, which will be expanded from 10 to about 40 will be in June.  The entire process is expected to take about a year.

 

Also in January, Robert Knouss, M.D., Director of the Office of Emergency Preparedness, and Gary Moore, Deputy Director of the OEP, approved the concept of a “Forensic Oversight Panel” for DMORT.  This group will have representatives from each of the forensic science disciplines who will review any question or suggestion that is brought to DMORT for operations.  They will review suggestions or complaints and make recommendations to the DMORT leadership.  We are very privileged and honored that Dr. Fred Jordan, Medical Examiner for the State of Oklahoma, has agreed to act as the chairman of the Forensic Oversight Committee.  We will advise on the progress of the committee at the N.D.M.S. conference.  

 

Several members of DMORT have also been activated for pre-deployment activities for the Inauguration and the Presidential Address to Congress. 

 

We also send our deepest sympathies to Grady Bray on the loss of his stepfather, Charles Brown, this past month.  Also, please keep Grant Kennedy, a member of the Region 2 team, in your prayers.  Grant is undergoing a very serious operation this month.  Get well cards may be sent to Grant Kennedy, 15 Bristol Street, Canandaigua, NY, 14624.

 

 

 

REGIONAL EVENTS

 

Region 5 Training

 

The Region V DMORT Team is scheduled to take part in "Operation Unite" (a WMD program sponsored by the VA, DOD, etc) on Selfridge Air National Guard Base from June 6^th through 10th.  It is anticipated that DMORT's major training will take place between Wednesday and Saturday morning of that week.

 

The program will be similar to our previous training session at Selfridge in August 1998.  It includes a series of DMORT and other classes (decontamination, moulage, etc) and will include a mock WMD terrorist attack on the headquarters of General Motors. This time we plan to also include a special exercise on scene search, recovery and documentation.

 

Details will be provided as they become available.

 

 

REGION 6

 

The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 was the first major deployment for DMORT Region VI.  During this event members assisted the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner both in the recovery of victims at the building site as well as processing of victims at the Medical Examiners Office. 

 

Over the past 6 years through efforts of numerous persons the site of the bombing has been transformed into a memorial to the victims of this terrorist event.  In April of 2000 President Clinton traveled to Oklahoma City to dedicate this memorial and in February of 2001 President Bush presided over the dedication of the museum that is located in the Journal Record Building that is located directly in front the former site of the Murrah Building.

 

The efforts of all agencies are detailed in the museum and included in these displays are the accomplishments of DMORT and their partnership with USAR and the Oklahoma City Fire Department in the long recovery efforts. All of DMORT can be proud of our accomplishments in this and subsequent deployments and if the opportunity ever presents itself the museum is a worthwhile visit.

 

 

Region 10

 

 

Region X DMORT has several talented members in many disciplines and we are proud to be able to participate in the overall picture of disaster response. We currently have three members writing books regarding their special area of interest.

 

Gerald Montgomery, PhD. had become a Certified Master Chaplain of the International Conference of Police Chaplains, a remarkable deed. He has several other extraordinary credentials and is the President of the Workplace Institute. He developed a training program called "Delivering the World's Worst News" which is currently being developed into a full textbook, to be published in the Spring of 2001.

 

Dan Rohling has recently completed the long list of requirements for designation of Certified Funeral Service Practitioner by the Academy of Professional Funeral Service Practice. He has also had professional articles recently published in funeral service publications.

 

Discussion is currently underway for a joint training with at least one other region for our annual regional training, probably in mid-September.

Even though there haven’t been any recent official activations, the Oregon State Medical Examiners Office recently came to us for assistance in obtaining a K-9/Cadaver Dog Search Team. Members Andy Rebmann and Marcia Koenig quickly volunteered their services and their search dogs to assist."

 

DMORT-WMD

 

The DMORT-WMD Team is conducting their annual training in Rock Hill, South Carolina on the first weekend in March.  The training will introduce all of the team members to the personal protective clothing and decontamination equipment used by the team.   

 

 

American Academy Of Forensic Sciences annual meeting held in Seattle. 

 

The 53^rd annual meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences was held in Seattle, Washington from February 17^th through 24^th.  Papers were presented on numerous topics of interest to DMORT team members.  “The Use of Table Top Exercises” focused on a theoretical ferry accident that produced hundreds of fatalities.  WinID2, the dental ID software used by DMORT dentists, was used in an odontology paper to illustrate ante and postmortem record matching.  Another paper provided a primer on effective media relations in mass fatality incidents. 

 

A paper presented by a trio of British scientists explored the psychological impact of mass casualty incidents on forensic odontologists.  The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland was reviewed in a paper presented by forensic engineers. 

 

Posters were presented by a number of authors on identification methods used in aircraft disasters, analysis of skeletal remains from mass graves, challenges in victim recovery operations in aircraft disasters, and the role of DNA analysis in mass disasters.

 

These examples are far from a comprehensive list, and many other papers and posters were presented in areas of interest to practitioners of specific forensic science disciplines.  Some of the presenters were DMORT team members and others were affiliated with agencies that work with DMORT at scenes of mass fatalities.  The 2002 meeting will be held in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

 

 

Family Assistance Center Core Group  And

Regional Team Leaders Meeting

 

By Christie Whitaker, Region 4

 

Regional team leaders, members of the Family Assistance Center Core Group, representatives from OEP, representatives from NTSB and our National Commander and Deputy Commander came together for a training program on February 1 and 2.   The following is a brief synopsis, and additional information is available on the web site www.dmort.org.

 

Dr. Grady Bray spoke on the human factors of incidents pointing out the unique characteristics of family members who experience a crisis.  He also stressed the impact that a family’s reactions may have on us as responders.  Dr. Bray’s presentation brought to focus several key points for those working in the family assistance center:  1. acquire a good knowledge base and understanding of the human factors involved in crisis situations; 2. have a high level of comfort in working with families in crisis; and  3. possess adequate skills for interviewing families in crisis.

 

Sharon Bryson, Deputy Director for Family Affairs of the National Transportation Safety Board presented an overview and a brief history of the Board and discussed the development of and the current structure of the Family Assistance Center in transportation incidents.  Ms. Bryson gave us an understanding of the relationship between NTSB and DMORT and defined the roles and responsibilities within the family assistance center for both NTSB and DMORT.

 

Robert Shank, Jr. and Don Bloom gave an overview of VIP, the computer based program used to integrate the ante mortem with the postmortem in the identification process.  This program has proved to be a valuable tool since its development.  It is available on the web site.

 

Dale Downey, Commander of DMORT IV, shared with the group updated information on DMORT WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction).   Please visit the web site to view his presentation. 

 

A special thanks to Gary Moore and the others from OEP, Carol Gregory, Jack Beall, Capt. William Tyler, and Pete Podell, for making this training possible and for their presence with us.  We also thank Frank Ciaccio from NTSB for taking time to be with us.  My personal feeling is that all of us left the meeting with greater knowledge and with a continued commitment toward developing a positive DMORT response in all areas of a deployment.

           

 

 

“DOWN ON THE BODY FARM”

The Only Place On Earth Dedicated To Studying Human Decay In Order To

Advance The Science Of Crime Busting

BY DANIEL PEDERSEN

Reprinted from Newsweek

 

The air smells sickeningly sweet, with honeysuckle and death. The Body Farm--the only place in the world where corpses rot in the open air to advance human knowledge--sits on a wooded hillside an easy three-minute troll from the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville. Not everyone comes here voluntarily. The cadaver under the honeysuckle, for instance, had been shot in the chest and abdomen after a drug deal gone wrong 10 days earlier. No one knows what happened to his headless neighbor 20 feet away--a woman found floating last summer in the Tennessee River.

 

William Bass III, 73, the Body Farm's founder, doesn't find the scene ghoulish. "I see this as a scientific challenge," he says, as maggots work efficiently on 20 or so corpses decomposing in the early autumn sun. Then Bass uses a gloved hand to lift a rotting limb.

 

Ask any detective. Solving a crime--from a drug-cartel hit to a garden-variety murder--often depends upon pinpointing the time of death. To do so requires the empirical study of decomposing humans; this humble site in Tennessee is the world's foremost laboratory for doing just that. (A key character in Patricia Cornwell's best-selling novel "The Body Farm," pathologist Lyall Shade, was based loosely on Bass.) But Bass's life work is no fiction. Only 61 American anthropologists now apply their broad-ranging science to crime busting. Bass trained 19 of them. His graduates labor from

the Smithsonian to the U.S. Army Central Identification Lab in Hawaii to major metropolitan morgues. Several have probed mass graves in Kosovo and Bosnia. One rebuilt Branch Davidian leader David Koresh's skull in 1993. Another uncovered remains from Mexican drug-cartel murders near Juarez late

last year.

 

Now the FBI has paid the Body Farm the ultimate compliment: the bureau sent 32 top agents here for the first time ever this year for a course in human decomposition. "There's just no substitute for actuality," says Quantico Special Agent Todd McCall.  Bill Bass thought exactly that when he got the idea for the Body Farm, a name coined by Knoxville cops in the 1980s, to the chagrin of some academics who still prefer to call it "the facility." Bass doesn't--he tries to remain resolutely comic in the face of death. He joined the anthropology faculty at UT in 1971. A few years later police asked his advice about the mysterious corpse from a disturbed grave nearby. Looking at the remains of pink flesh still clinging to the bones, Professor Bass estimated the time since death at one year. Oops. More research proved the dead man to be William Shy, a Confederate colonel embalmed and then entombed in an iron casket whose seal was finally broken by grave robbers. "I only missed it by 113 years," says Bass. "And every time I testify in court, the other side still brings that up."

 

Bass realized then just how squeamishness and religious beliefs about the body had impeded hard-eyed study of the process of human decay. He still regards it as preposterous that 90 percent of people studying to be law-enforcement agents have never seen a corpse, or that, until the Body Farm, entomologists knew far too little about the remarkable parade of

insects after death: from blowfly to maggot to carpet beetle. So Bass went to his dean with a matter-of-fact plan: "I said I wanted some land to put some dead bodies on," he said. "The dean didn't blink an eye." A few months later the first corpse arrived.

 

Over the years, more than 300 people have decayed on this leafy Tennessee

hillside--some in car trunks, others under water, some under earth, some

hung from scaffolds. Corpses of criminals whose relatives won't pay to bury them sometimes end up here. But more than 100 people, many of them academics and professionals, have signed up on their own for afterlife on the farm.  "I'm an outdoors person, and it seems like the perfect place to go," says Roy Crawford, 49, an engineer who manages a mineral holding company in Kentucky. "The idea of being loaded full of chemicals and preserved for no good reason makes no sense to me." UT tries to keep a generally low profile for the shady glade behind the hospital. Chain link and fencing topped with razor wire surround the two-acre site, partly to keep fraternity brothers--or Halloween cultists--from their midnight rounds.  Even so, outsiders sometimes call the university switchboard, asking for the Body Farm's nonexistent phone number. "Nobody there needs a phone," Bass

explains. "I told my secretary to tell people it's 1-800-I-AM-DEAD."

 

Bass thinks some level of public awareness can foster understanding. But tours of the farm ended after two den mothers called to ask if they could bring their Cub Scouts through.

Meanwhile, original research at the farm continues. One pending goal: to

produce an atlas for law enforcement that will provide what Murray Marks, a colleague of Bass's who led the FBI classes and now heads the Body Farm, calls "a gold standard" for decomposition - a page-by-page, color-by-color, insect-by-insect depiction of the process of human decay on a time and temperature line. Another: to bury multiple bodies under four pads of concrete of varying thicknesses so the FBI can test its latest ground-penetrating radar. A third: to pursue the biochemical breakthrough that will enable scientists to pinpoint time of death based on the level of once obscure gases, like putrescine and cadaverine.

 

Body Farm alumni have probed many of the world's trouble spots. William Rodriguez, chief deputy for special investigations with the U.S. Armed Forces Medical Examiner in Washington, D.C., led the U.S. medical team into Kosovo just after last year's armistice. It looked at 300 victims from two different regions and provided the War Crimes Tribunal with evidence for the initial indictments against Slobodan Milosevic. "Most of the remains were in an advanced state of decomposition," says Rodriguez, who earned his Ph.D. from UT in 1984 and remains in weekly contact with his mentor Bass. The Americans gave scientific backing to eyewitness accounts--times of death and proof of how ethnic Albanians had been killed. The team differentiated between damage done by animals or quick mass burial, on the one hand, and gunshot wounds, shrapnel wounds or rifle butts to the head, on the other.

 

Without Bass and the accumulated research from the Body Farm, Rodriguez told NEWSWEEK, "I couldn't have answered well over 50 percent of those questions." With all its current success, the Body Farm faces an even stronger future. The FBI will return with a second class next February. The State Department

has just forwarded an inquiry from Turkish and Hungarian law enforcement, asking the Body Farm to take its decomposition show overseas for the first time. Marks says the main lesson for law officers focuses on evidence preservation. "The point is not to turn them into forensic anthropologists but to teach them how to get the evidence into the hands of specialists."

 

What's really needed, Bass and Marks argue, are more facilities like the Body Farm at different latitudes. "You decompose much more slowly in Minnesota than you do in Miami," says Bass. Tennessee data apply to a

temperate belt around the globe, punctuated by the intense heat and humidity of July and August that can produce clean skeletons in less than two weeks. "It's ashes to ashes and dust to dust," says Marks. "It's exquisite how nature takes care of the process." It's not easy to be so philosophical about the unpleasant realities of this process. Until more institutions work up the enthusiasm, the world may just have to give sober thanks for the Body Farm it has already.

NDMS – April 21^st through 25^th  Dallas, Texas

 

This year’s NDMS conference is being held in Dallas, Texas from Saturday, April 21^st through Wednesday, April 25th.  Additional information is available by visiting the OEP-NDMS web site www.oep-ndms.dhhs.gov  for on-line registration and program information.

 

 

MASS FATALITY INCIDENT PROGRAMS IN SPAIN AND PORTUGAL

 

Dr. Frank Saul, Regional Commander, DMORT V and Julie Saul, Forensic Anthropologist, DMORT V, were the featured speakers at Spain's "Medicolegal

Problems of Great Disasters" course in Madrid sponsored by their Justice

Department on 13 November 2000 and a similar program in Lisbon sponsored by the Medicolegal Society of Portugal on 18 November 2000.

 

At both meetings they spoke about "The Disaster Mortuary Operational

Response Team (DMORT) Model for Managing Mass Fatality Incidents (MFIs) in the United States of America."  They also showed the Discovery Channel video "On the Inside: Disaster Response Team," which was very well received.  Both

presentations were followed by extensive formal and informal discussion inasmuch as both countries believe that although they have had few mass fatality incidents they must be better prepared for the future and they wished to make use of DMORT's experience in these matters.  They were especially interested in the role of Forensic Anthropology.

 

In addition, the Sauls had an earlier (3-5 November 2000) opportunity to

meet with their colleagues of the Forensic Science Society of the United Kingdom in Bromsgrove.  In particular, they were able to discuss mutual concerns regarding fragmentary remains with Dr. Tzipi Kahana, a Captain (and Forensic Anthropologist) with the Israeli Police who is a veteran investigator of bombing incidents.