All That Remains

by Sue Black

  CHAPTER 11

  When disaster strikes

  ‘Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals’

  Attributed to William E. Gladstone

  prime minister of the UK (1809–98)

  Fingerprinting in Disaster Victim Identification training.

  ON BOXING DAY 2004 people across the world looked on, horrified, as a tsunami ripped around the Indian Ocean coastlines of Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India. Most of us had had little occasion to use the word ‘tsunami’ (which means ‘harbour wave’) before that day, but it would be peppering everybody’s conversation for months in the devastating aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history.

  No country in the world is immune to mass fatalities caused by disasters, whether these are brought about by a natural catastrophe or occur accidentally, as a result of human error or corporate negligence, or are deliberately perpetrated by acts of terrorism. For the sake of decency, health and justice, the deceased need to be managed, and this is best achieved through the well-rehearsed process of Disaster Victim Identification (DVI). To work successfully, DVI requires preparedness, advanced communication networks, inter-agency co-operation, crisis-management capabilities, efficient implementation of emergency plans and a swift response from trained personnel. It is complex, challenging, time-consuming and it is expensive. The incontrovertible fact that a mass-fatality event cannot be dealt with quickly, cheaply or easily needs to be accepted by every government around the world unfortunate enough to have one happen on its soil. History has shown us that if we do not pay attention to our dead in a proper and dignified manner, someone will be held to account and this can, and has, resulted in the fall of governments. It is a very serious business.

  A mass-fatality event is often defined as an emergency situation where dealing with the numbers of injured and deceased, or parts of the deceased, exceeds the capability of a local response. This comfortably flexible definition, which does not attempt to quantify the casualties, reflects the fact that some regions have greater resources at their disposal than others and are able to cope at the same time as meeting the everyday demands of their region. The UK has seen its share of mass-fatality events and while, mercifully, the numbers have often been low enough for most areas to manage, there have been several major incidents in living memory in which more than a hundred people have lost their lives. Among them are the Gresford mining disaster of 1934, when an explosion killed 266 men and boys in north-east Wales; the still unexplained fuel explosion on board HMS Dasher in 1943, which claimed 379 lives in the Firth of Clyde, and the infamous Aberfan colliery disaster of 1966, when a wall of coal slurry crashed through a junior school. A hundred and sixteen of the 144 who died there were children. In 1988, Scotland was the scene of two major disasters: the Piper Alpha North Sea oil and gas explosion killed 167 men, and 270 lives were lost when Pan Am flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie by a terrorist bomb concealed in a suitcase in the hold.

  Given the multinational nature of our modern world, it is inconceivable nowadays that any event large enough to cause a mass fatality anywhere will not involve citizens of other countries. The horrific fire in 2017 at Grenfell Tower is a case in point. This requires us to think globally and to work in international partnership. The country where the event has occurred generally takes the lead, and it is incumbent on responders from other nations to be cognisant of relevant customs and laws. Forensic experts are always desperate to roll up their sleeves and just get on with the job – a job that nobody else in their right minds would ever want to do – but while the need to cross borders to recover and repatriate fellow citizens who have died on foreign soil may well be urgent, there will be diplomatic, governmental and legal hurdles that must be overcome first. As I found when working in Kosovo, in some countries you may not be able to deploy as swiftly as you would like, and this can be incredibly frustrating.

  The most devastating tsunami in history was triggered by an undersea earthquake off the coast of Sumatra – the second-largest seismic event ever recorded. The massive oceanic waves it generated wreaked death and destruction in fourteen countries bordering the Indian Ocean. To say that they were caught unprepared would be an understatement. As this sort of natural disaster is extremely rare in the Indian Ocean, there were no early-warning systems of the kind introduced around the Pacific Ocean, where the possibility of volcanic eruptions and tsunamis was considered more likely. Over 250,000 people died, a further 40,000 were reported missing and millions were displaced. Over half the fatalities were in Indonesia, and the highest proportion of European casualties were among those on holiday in Thailand at the height of the winter tourist season.

  As Tom and I watched the first reports coming out of Thailand on our television screen that Boxing Day, he looked over at me and said, ‘You may as well pack your bags – you know you will be going.’ As it turned out, I knew no such thing. Across the UK, forensic practitioners waited and waited for the call that would take them and their skills out to the devastated areas, all straining at the leash to jump on a plane. The silence from government was deafening. Eventually a tiny little press release was issued, announcing, with no fanfare whatsoever, that the Metropolitan Police were sending out some fingerprint officers. What?

  It was the last straw as far as I was concerned. I sat down and wrote one of my ‘middle-aged, redheaded, irascible Celtic woman’ letters to the prime minister, Tony Blair, reminding him that forensic scientists and police had been quite clear on many occasions about how crucial it was to set up a DVI response capability – on the basis not that it ‘might’ be needed, but that it would be needed. It was vital that the UK was ready to react the moment a disaster occurred. Yet here we were sending out a measly handful of police officers when what the situation demanded was a strong DVI presence like the one provided four years earlier in Kosovo. We were nothing short of a global embarrassment, in my humble opinion.

  I told Mr Blair that I considered national capability preparedness a matter of such urgency that, if a prompt response from the government was not forthcoming, I would be writing to express my views to the leaders of the other two main political parties. The silence just grew louder. I kept my word and sent copies of my letter to Michael Howard and Paddy Ashdown, then at the helm of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats respectively. Perhaps inevitably, someone leaked my letter to the press and all hell was let loose – just as I was heading out of the country. Tired of hanging around for a call from the government, I had accepted the invitation of Kenyon International, a private DVI company, to fly out to Thailand, leaving poor Tom to field the calls from the press and broadcasters.

  I saw in the New Year somewhere above Switzerland. With virtually every passenger bound for Bangkok for reasons related to the disaster, many of them on their way to try to find missing family members, it was an eerie and melancholy affair. As 2005 dawned, the pilot, who was himself well aware of why the flight was so full, came on to the tannoy and said that, while in normal circumstances we would all celebrate with some bubbles, this New Year he would ask us simply to raise our glasses in silence to those who had lost their lives, those who lost their loved ones and those who were on their way to help. It was a very emotional moment for everyone.

  Thailand was in total chaos. Press and frantic families were flowing into the affected areas and the local services were struggling to cope. The depredations of the tsunami seemed haphazard. Vast swathes of land were laid to waste while others had been left miraculously unaltered. You would see a hotel standing apparently unscathed amid the rubble of all the buildings that had once surrounded it. Usually when working in a disaster zone, we expect to be sleeping on military cots or perhaps even under canvas, so it was somewhat disconcerting to be spending our days in the deprivation and despair of the makeshift mortuaries and then r
eturning at night to a luxury hotel and its restaurants, bars and swimming pools. It just didn’t feel right. When I was invited to use the hotel’s laundry service, and questioned what seemed like an obscene luxury, I was reminded that the economy still badly needed to generate income from its paralysed tourism sector. We were the closest thing to tourists that Thailand was going to see for a wee while.

  I had just finished unpacking my suitcase when my phone rang. It was my old senior Met officer friend from Kosovo. ‘CW, are you still causing trouble?’ he asked. ‘I do hope so.’ I could hear the amusement in his voice as he told me he had been instructed to liaise with me officially to find out whether I had a genuine concern over the need for a UK DVI response force or was just stirring up discontent. Oddly, he didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead he warned me to expect a phone call within a few minutes from the prime minister’s private secretary.

  Sure enough, the phone rang again, this time with an invitation to a closed meeting to discuss a DVI response capability for the UK. The Downing Street official assured me courteously that this could be arranged to suit my diary. My goodness me. It had never been my intention to give the government a headache, less still a bloody nose, and I was well aware that if I wasn’t careful it could rebound on me. I had spoken out simply to voice my firm belief that it is the duty of all those who have the skills required in a mass-fatality event to provide national assistance when the need arises. In a world where accidents, forces of nature and malign intent can strip away the lives of those we care about in the blink of an eye, we need to be standing by, fully trained, to handle the aftermath swiftly and professionally. Differences and egos have to be put to one side and everyone must pull together for the common good.

  Good grief, but the heat and humidity in Thailand were overwhelming. One of these days I will be sent to a cold country more climatically suited to a redhead. Graham Walker, who was to become the UK’s first DVI commander, once remarked to me on the craziness of a job where we think it perfectly normal for one of our colleagues to pass out through heat and exhaustion. And what do we do when that happens? We just prop them up against a wall, give them some water and, when they feel better, consider it quite OK for them to go back to work. Unusual people, unusual circumstances, extraordinary commitment.

  The biggest enemy of victim identification in hot and humid countries is rapid decomposition. So a fast response and attention to the preservation of remains are a priority. A record of the locations where bodies have been found is also extremely helpful in speeding up the identification process, especially when people have died somewhere you would expect them to have been at the time, such as in their homes or on the premises of the hotel where they are registered. Thailand was to make our job even harder by confounding us on both counts.

  The bodies from each town were being taken to local temples. When we arrived at our first collection site, Khao Lak, the scene we encountered outside the temple was truly grim. In an attempt to help, people who had access to vehicles had been collecting corpses all round the country and delivering them en masse to the entrances of city temples. There was no indication of who had been found where, or by whom – corpses were just arriving stacked high on the backs of ancient flatbed trucks and being unloaded at the front gates to be sorted and perhaps eventually claimed. As they came off the vehicles their faces were photographed and the images stored on computers in the temple courtyard. Bearing in mind that this was a week after the disaster, the degree of bloating, discolouration and decomposition was extensive.

  Families searching desperately for loved ones began their quest by pinning up their own photographs of the missing on a wall, accompanied by messages begging anyone who might have seen them to get in touch, in the hope that maybe they might still be alive in a hospital somewhere. Then relatives would go the temple courtyard and sit at the computers clicking through the hundreds of photographs of unrecognisable decomposing corpses, looking for the face of their son, daughter, mother, father, husband or wife. It was chaotic, hugely distressing and grossly ineffective. In the early days, bodies were being released to people purely on the basis that they thought they recognised them from one of these pictures. Not surprisingly, when a more scientific system eventually kicked in, many of the bodies were found to have been incorrectly identified and had to be recalled. This is, obviously, something to be avoided at all costs.

  When we reached the temples we did three things immediately. First, we ordered refrigerated truck units to get the bodies cooled down and halt decomposition. Next we put a stop to families viewing galleries of decomposing faces. Then we suspended the release of any further bodies on hold until identity could be confirmed scientifically.

  Before the ‘reefers’ – the refrigerated units – arrived, the bodies were laid out side by side in the temple forecourts. Attempts were made by the local teams to shade them from the direct heat of the sun by erecting tent-like coverings. At one stage, dry ice was packed around them to try to keep the temperature down. This never worked because the bodies closest to the edges suffered freeze burn and when our teams touched them, they got burned as well. The stench was indescribable. As the days wore on, the corpses continued to bloat and the turgidity caused by captured gas and fluids resulted in the pitiful sight of elevated limbs. When you looked down a long row of the dead, it seemed as if the raised arms or legs were trying to attract your attention. There was little running water, the heat was suffocating and the flies and rodent activity were of plague proportions. If Dante’s hell were to be experienced on earth, those early days came very, very close to it.

  Nobody was to blame for the situation. The first days after any disaster are often the most taxing and confused, and given the scale of this one, the practical difficulties were bound to be severe. It was the Norwegians who eventually came to the rescue by offering to fund a centralised temporary mortuary. Its construction, though, would take a while and in the meantime, it was a matter of coping as best we could with the limited resources available and a huge amount of lateral thinking and improvisation. And, tough though it was, this is the stage of an investigation I love the most: the hiatus before bureaucracy and politics step in, where experience and ingenuity come to the fore. This is the time when you feel you can make the greatest difference. I love the challenge of getting systems up and running. Once all is operating smoothly, I become easily bored. I believe we made a difference in those initial days in Thailand, although the red tape did start to appear very quickly.

  Teams from the UK and other countries would stay on in the devastated region for close to a year, trying to identify and name those who had lost their lives. Many bodies were successfully returned to their relatives but a few stubborn identities remained unknown. The death toll was 5,400 in Thailand alone, and in some places whole families had been wiped out, leaving nobody to report them missing and nobody to provide the antemortem information that would allow us to make a comparison. In others, entire communities were razed to the ground, along with the records of their inhabitants, who were never missed or mourned. A memorial wall was built to commemorate all of Thailand’s dead, and for some this remains the only epitaph. For DVI, it was a revolutionary operation that showed what can be achieved when international teams and governments work together.

  Back in the UK, the meeting to which I had been invited to discuss the UK DVI response took place at Admiralty Arch. Slightly delayed by the London traffic, I found everyone there waiting for me when I arrived, which was not an auspicious start. In attendance were representatives of the highest levels of government, police and science policy. Some faces were familiar; others looked a little less welcoming. It was all rather stilted and awkward and I stood out like a rhino in a petting zoo. It was clear that the government had me pegged as a troublemaker and that officials had been briefed to be conciliatory. But my old friend from the Met was there, smiling encouragingly at his CW, so I knew I had at least one genuine ally in the room. And actually it turned out to be
a really positive meeting. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that we needed a national response capability and that it should include police, government and scientific support. It was accepted that it was a matter of when, not if, we would next need to mobilise it. At last!

  If any proof of that were needed, it would not be long in coming. Indeed, never had such a discussion taken place at a more timely moment. This meeting was held in February of 2005, a year that was to bring national and global deployments we simply could not have anticipated. The 7 July terrorist attack on London’s transport network in the morning rush hour, which brought the city to its knees, was swiftly followed by more suicide bombings in the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh. Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US Gulf Coast in August, and the Pakistan earthquake in October both struck while we were still trying to address the problems in Thailand. So it was a landmark year for DVI, not only within the UK but across the world.

  Finally, in 2006, a national team of forensic experts, police, intelligence officers, family liaison officers and other DVI personnel was set up under the command of Detective Superintendent Graham Walker to undertake and coordinate the task of identifying British victims involved in disasters at home and abroad. It was clear that a UK DVI training programme was required to ensure that a police officer deployed from Devon in the south of England would work to exactly the same protocols and procedures as an officer from Caithness in the north of Scotland. This doesn’t sound like it should have been an insurmountable problem but, as one officer commented to me, ‘We have over forty police forces and they can’t agree on a uniform, let alone a way of working.’ Dundee University successfully tendered for the job of providing DVI mortuary training for police across the UK and, between 2007 and 2009, over 550 officers from every force in the country would come through our doors to learn the procedural and scientific underpinning of DVI.