Lac-Megantic close-up: Inside the security perimeter
Social workers help shell-shocked Lac-Megantic residents
MONTREAL—Nearly two years ago, Dr. Lyne Chouinard, Quebec's deputy coroner, embarked on what may prove to have been the most important assignment of her career and for the lives cut short in the Lac-Mégantic train explosion.
Her mission was to create a fool-proof plan for emergency and medical personnel when responding to a disaster involving multiple deaths.
Chouinard's mandate ends in October, and her report has already been drafted, said the provincial coroner's spokesperson, Genevieve Guilbault. But the mass-fatality plan is already undergoing a trial by fire as officials conduct the exhaustive and grisly job of putting faces to the estimated 47 victims.
Forty-two bodies have been located so far. Just over half — 22 — have been identified. The first named victim, 93-year-old Eliane Parenteau, was identified by her jewelry and a metal plate near her hip.
But others lacking the marks of past surgeries and tattoos, or whose bodies, teeth and bones were burned badly in the oil-tanker fires, will be subject to cutting-edge science, including DNA analysis and rigorous medical detective work. It could take weeks or months before their families get the closure they are seeking.
"Extreme heat is one of the worst things for DNA," said Dr. Thomas Parsons, chief of forensic pathology for the Sarajevo-based International Commission on Missing Persons, which has used DNA analysis to identify 17,000 victims of ethnic violence in the former Yugoslavia, including those whose degraded remains were pulled from mass graves.
"When you cremate somebody, for example, you reduce someone to their basic elements that can't be burned, and all the other stuff is gone."
The particularities of the Lac-Mégantic crash — a series of violent explosions followed by two days of intense fire in a populated, public space rather than a sealed airplane with a set passenger list crashing in a farmer's field — classify it as an "open event" in coroners' jargon. The most difficult of cases, an open event means there could be any number of people killed in the crash, and that is why Quebec provincial police had, until Friday, remained vague in saying that they were looking for "about 50" people.
But experts says that in addition to those whose bodies may have been rendered unrecognizable by the flames, there could be others who were killed but never reported missing — someone with no family members to notice they were gone.
One report this week said that search crews are now looking for fragments of bodies rather than intact corpses in pools of oil and other toxic chemicals, providing a glimpse into both the horror and the technical difficulties involved in investigating the blast site.
And while no human being can be emotionally prepared for the devastation of such work, an exhaustive system that was forged in the fires of the 9/11 terror attacks is helping medical investigators manage the mountains of evidence and information coming in from the crash site and from family members.
That much was confirmed by Frank DePaolo, New York's assistant commissioner for emergency preparedness, who ran the victim identification effort at Ground Zero, who helped to train officials in Quebec, and who visited Lac-Mégantic this week. Under DePaolo's watch, American officials sifted through railroad cars full of rubble for human remains, spending millions of dollars per victim, while U.S. military scientists developed advances in extracting DNA from bone fragments, said Parsons.
"I don't know that there's too many people in the public sector that have the experience that he has and the knowledge that he has," said John Fudenberg, the assistant coroner in Las Vegas and president of the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners.
But every disaster is unique. A spokesperson for the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said DePaolo's visit was as much a learning experience as a teaching task.
"He realizes what a complex and difficult tragedy that you're dealing with in Canada right now and . . . he feels that the structure that's been put in place is very comprehensive," said the spokesperson. "He's just glad he could come up and exchange ideas, and he's overwhelmed with the enormity of the tragedy that occurred in Canada."
The massive effort involved in identifying large numbers of victims killed in the train crash started with a list of names. There were thousands of them at first. Over days it became 1,000, then 750. For more than a week it seemed stuck at "about 50" before being revised down to 47 after separate and intensive missing person investigations.
Behind those 47 names there are 47 families relying on the rigour and discipline of science and information management to be laid overtop the chaos that was caused by the explosion.
Identifying victims of a mass casualty accident is an exhaustive, laborious process that usually starts with a simple family tree and, in the most complex cases, ends with cutting-edge science.
The creation of a family tree by victim identification experts is followed by requests for personal items of those believed to have died. The Quebec coroner's office made that request just days after the Lac-Mégantic crash, calling for toothbrushes, razors and hairbrushes, which are the best sources of DNA. But genetic identifiers can also be extracted from lipstick, cigarette butts, drinking cups, eyeglasses and earphones; even pens with bite marks can help in the identification process, according to a 2007 report by the International Society for Forensic Genetics' DNA Commission.
Swabbing family members for a possible DNA comparison is also standard procedure, though there are limitations.
"Very close relatives are better," said Parsons. "Then siblings are good, but they're not as good, and the more of them you have, the better . . . But you get into a wide range of different combinations and then you have to have the computational experience to deal with them all."
But it is still highly reliable. Matching victim DNA to that of family members was the method used in each of the 17,000 positive identifications in the former Yugoslavia, he added.
The flipside of the identity sleuthing is the condition of the human remains that are being pulled from the Lac-Mégantic's popular Musi-Café or from any of the 30 homes that were obliterated in the blasts and scorched in the fires that raged for two days.
Speed is of the essence when collecting DNA samples from human tissue. But two weeks after the explosion, with the site scorched by the sun and drenched in oil and other chemicals that the train was carrying, the most valuable finds will be the bones, bone fragments and teeth samples that may remain.
Those who have seen mass death up close, however, caution that the identification process could slow down significantly under such challenging conditions. Finding, examining, testing and cross-referencing any information those samples yield takes time, as brutal as that may seem to grieving families and an anxious public.
"One of the most difficult parts is that it's not physically possible to complete the identification process in the time that the public generally expects it," said Fudenberg.
"In a case where you have fragmented remains, you've got to identify decedents with very little information, so that can be a very challenging, exhausting effort."
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