Inside a temporary morgue near the Maui County coroner's office, a team of specialists – including forensic pathologists, X-ray technicians, fingerprint experts and forensic dentists – labor 12 hours a day to identify the charred remains of the victims of this month's cataclysmic wildfire.
They are members of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team program, or DMORT, deployed when a mass fatality incident overwhelms local authorities.
There are 10 regional DMORTs around the United States, comprised of more than 600 civilian members, that spring into action for disasters as varied as airplane crashes, hurricanes and mass attacks such as the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings. Work is divided into two buckets: "postmortem" – analyzing remains – and "antemortem" – gathering information from surviving relatives.
A separate group, known as a "Victim Identification Center" team, is helping to collect details from surviving relatives for possible matches: DNA swabs, the names of victims' dentists and whether fingerprint records might exist. For years, teams responded to major transportation accidents, cemetery floods and natural disasters. But the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks represented a pivot point, when DMORT teams helped city authorities sift through thousands of remains.
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