Grim task faces special police disaster team

Hamish McCardle

A team of New Zealanders will arrive in Phuket today facing one of the grimmest tasks of the aid operation in the tsunami-devastated area.

As bodies are dragged from the rubble of buildings or washed ashore by the swirling ocean, the disaster victim identification team will help to identify the dead.

"It's not a nice job - very, very difficult," said the leader, Superintendent Hamish McCardle.

Speaking to the Herald minutes before flying from Auckland Airport yesterday, Mr McCardle said his team were seasoned professionals who knew the job well.
"But the scale is something we've never seen before and it will be a learning experience for all of us."

The 10-member team comprises a pathologist, dental expert and eight police expert in body identification.

It will work with Thai authorities in what is increasingly a race against time. Bodies need to be removed and identified before diseases, which health experts say could kill as many as the waves, take hold.

Mr McCardle said the team would use methods including forensic dentistry, DNA matching and fingerprinting.

The team is accompanied by a six-member emergency response team. Made up of officials from police, the Defence Force, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, that team would specifically help New Zealand victims and their families, Mr McCardle said.

An Air Force Hercules flew to Indonesia on Tuesday. Mr McCardle said the new aid would be specifically for Thailand.

"That's where we fear the worst of the New Zealand victims possibly caught up in this will be."

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade is compiling a list of missing New Zealanders and police will begin contacting families to gain access to dental records. Those records will then be compared with the jaws and teeth of the dead.

Dr Howard Mace, past president of the New Zealand Society of Forensic Dentistry, said it would be a long, complex process using Interpol's disaster identification protocols.

Many people had been crushed or drowned, and bodies were decomposing rapidly. Teeth were durable and provided a more accurate form of identification.

Police would try to match documents and jewellery while the forensic dentist would compare dental records with the teeth of the dead.

Dr Mace said a person's teeth and jaw gave them "a significant amount of individuality similar to a fingerprint" and the dentist would be looking to see if there was a unique feature that could help to identify the person.

Based on the age group of those who tended to visit Thailand, he guessed about 50 per cent would have dental records.

In the absence of dental records, teeth could be used to determine a person's age, for example based on the wear of the teeth and the amount the gum had receded.

"We can look at the type of dentistry and say that might have been done in New Zealand, styles of dentistry vary a little around the world."

Dr Mace said many dentists were likely to be away on holiday and he asked that they try to ensure someone from their practice was available to provide records to police.