 No matter where he is - Pennsylvania, Mississippi, or more recently, Louisiana - Warren Tewes, DDS, a clinical assistant professor in the Dental School, eats his lunch in the office.
"I stay in to keep the paper moving," says the forensic dentist.
That paper - filled with descriptions of everything from a person's tattoo down to his or her blood-type - is a crucial part of the process that Tewes follows to identify the remains of people killed in disasters and return their bodies to loved ones.
Tewes is a member of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), a federal program directed by the National Disaster Medical System. In incidences of mass casualties, the program deploys teams of volunteer medical, forensic, and mortuary professionals to recover and identify victims and prepare them for burial.
Tewes was called by DMORT to the Shanksville, Pa., crash site of United Flight 93, which went down during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
More recently, he spent this past September in the Hurricane Katrina-devastated Mississippi Gulf Coast. His team operated out of a temporary morgue that had been set up at an airport hanger with the sides blown out. The work conditions were primitive, power shortages were common, and indoor plumbing was nonexistent.
Tewes' team would break up each day into groups, each group traveling to one of three sites on the Gulf Coast.
Tewes trekked the thirty miles or so to Biloxi every day to a station his team established at the Biloxi Public Safety Building. The site provided families looking for missing members a place to give information and DNA samples.
"There was just no escaping the devastation, it just goes for hundreds of miles," says Tewes. Without electricity, communication, or water, "People were just trying to survive at that point."
Some of the area's massive casino barges had been lifted and moved onto shore. Cemeteries were uprooted and mausoleums ripped open in the aftermath of the storm.
Tewes says the message, that DMORT was there to help, was not getting out. With his commander's permission, he began to communicate more directly with the public. He became part of the daily press conference with national media outlets, including The New York Times, People Magazine, and the CBS Evening News.
The team put together a flier, had it translated into Vietnamese for the area's large Vietnamese community, and hired teenagers to distribute them.
Meanwhile Tewes and his team conducted the critical interviews with grieving families that would generate eight pages of detailed information on each missing individual. That information, along with DNA samples, usually resulted in the successful identification of a victim.
The families of the deceased provided as much information as possible: dental records, X-rays, blood-type information, photos, and descriptions of tattoos, scars, birthmarks, clothing, and jewelry.
Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed many health care record resources, such as medical and dental offices and hospitals, Tewes says. Without personal health records, victim identification became compromised and consequently, more difficult.
"Interviewing the families I thought would be pretty rugged," says Tewes. "But what I found was that the families want to be helpful and want us to be successful in what we do."
The information DMORT gathered was then entered into a computer program capable of assimilating 800 different items, and comparing that data to post-mortem data.
"Mississippi had a bit over 200 fatalities, and that was in the same neighborhood of the number of interviews we did," said Tewes.
On Oct. 26, Tewes was redeployed for two weeks to Baton Rouge, La., where his duties involve contacting the next-of-kin of victims to assist them with the release of their loved ones from the temporary morgue, and the initiation of funeral procedures.
Families' reactions have varied during the process, Tewes says, from those that have been fully prepared for a funeral to those that are unprepared, clinging to the hope that they will never receive a call.
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