• Struggling for survival
• 'Washed up' fishermen turn carpenter and build their own boats
• 'Tsunami village' rises from rubble
• Inspired by Church aid, sea gypsies turn to Christ
• Foreign aid crucial
• Body ID center looks future
• Shoddy housing doesn't make a home
• Outside volunteer carves new career in housing
• Counting the costs to the environment
• Underwater tourist trails
• Turtle hatchery at risk after waves
• Where the money went
• Covered for everything but the wave
• Corporations learn that caring counts
• Starting again from scratch
• Swedish survivor gains perspective after wave 'turned my life upside-down'
• Reasons to smile
• Justice will prevail, investor believes
• Courage and resilience ease personal pain
• Help wanted
• Second chance to get it right
• Tide turns on tourist demographics in Khao Lak
• Light on the horizon
• One day at a time
• Widows and orphans left out in the cold
• Art for the heart
RESCUE
Body ID center looks future
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| An official of Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) takes the body of a tsunami victim from the storage room after the identification process is completed. The body is returned to the family. |
Many bodies remain to be identified a year after the tsunami, but agencies involved in the grisly business are determined to press on with the work, despite bureaucratic upheavals.
Thai Tsunami Victim Identification (TTVI) won't let the relocation of its office from Phuket to Bangkok, which happened early this month, stand in the way of its work, assistant national police commissioner Pol Lt-Gen Achirawit Supannapesata said.
Altogether 3,778 bodies of the total 5,395 victims were sent to TTVI after the tsunami struck the six coastal provinces of Phangnga, Phuket, Krabi, Trang, Satun, and Ranong. Of that number, 2,705 have been identified and returned to their families.
The agency still has about 800 unclaimed bodies in its custody. Of these, about 268 have already been identified, and are waiting for relatives to claim them. The remaining 805 are yet to go through the final identification process.
TTVI decided to transfer all the unclaimed bodies to Bang Maruan cemetery in the worst-hit district of Takua Pa in Phangnga when it closed the Phuket office on Dec 16. The number of foreign experts working under TTVI will be enormously reduced, from 120 to 25. The closure followed a cabinet resolution in September.
The move has caused concern among relatives who still can't find their loved ones. They fear it will complicate the identification and body collection process.
However, Pol Lt-Gen Achirawit, who replaced retired TTVI director Pol Gen Noppadol Somboonsap in October, dismissed these concerns, saying TTVI's Bangkok office will work as a coordinating centre for the body collection process.
Relatives of already-identified bodies with matching identification evidence, such as DNA samples, fingerprints, and dental records, can process the claim without coming to the Bangkok office, he said.
Only those who have to produce further evidence are required to contact the Bangkok office, which is now located at the National Police Headquarters, he said.
Meanwhile, Pol Col Khemmarin Hassiri, chief of TTVI's Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) unit, said the agency will be more proactive in handling the remaining bodies. Instead of waiting for the victims' relatives to turn up, the agency will send the officers to them, beginning at the end of this month.
According to Pol Col Khemmarin, the officers would begin with the complaints of people whose loved ones went missing in the tsunami disaster.
There are some 400 complaints about missing people. Most of the complaints are from the South and the Northeast, he said.
The officers will see if the identification process can be arranged for members of this group, he said, without elaborating on the manpower and budget needed for the new job.
He conceded further identification will be complicated, as most bodies have now decomposed, added to which it's difficult to determine the nationality of the remaining bodies. Rudimentary identification samples have been collected from the bodies but they are inadequate.
Pol Col Khemmarin did not rule out the possibility that many of the unclaimed bodies could be Burmese migrant workers. He said that the unit had so far completed the identification of around 80 Burmese bodies and would return them to their families soon.
''The only thing we can do now is to try to find a match between the forensic evidence from the remaining bodies and those who are still searching for the missing, as quickly as possible,'' he said.
He said TTVI officers worked very hard in the past year, but the job is rewarding.
''After working so hard, a smile from relatives when they were able to finally locate the bodies of loved ones made us feel good,'' he said.
As for the future of TTVI' s headquarters in Bangkok, he said that right now he did not know exactly whether the work would be turned over to the Justice Ministry's Central Institute of Forensic Science or not. ''It's all up to the government,'' he said.
However, he said, he hoped the agency could become a learning and training centre to deal with future disasters, to capitalise on experiences learned in dealing with the tsunami.
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