9-11 and Mass Fatality Mgmt

9/11 and Mass Fatality Management

James Willbanks

June 28, 2007

CRJ-581 Impact of Terrorism on Homeland Security

Dr. Douglas Orr

Saint Leo University

Tuesday – September 11, 2001

A beautiful day in New York City was forever emblazoned in the minds of every American due to the horrific acts of a group of Al Qaeda terrorists. The terrorists did the unthinkable and used planes as weapons of mass destruction to destroy the World Trade Center and to damage the Pentagon. Recall the terror as we all watched on television when the planes hit their targets one-by-one. On an average day, there were 40,000 plus visitors and personnel working at various agencies and organizations within the buildings (FBI, 2001, p.15). There are an estimated 2,819 people who lost their lives on that day and each deserve to be identified and properly buried (Marchi, 2004, p.30). The World Trade Center designed by Minoru Yamasaki was built from 1966 to 1977 and destroyed in the span of less than two hours (Matthews, 2001). The Twin Towers consisted of two 110 floor buildings which stood 1,353 feet (ibid, 2001). It is unnerving to think of the sheer force pushed downward as these towers collapsed, which translates to 10,000,000 square feet of steel and concrete ending many human lives.

This event required a huge recovery effort due to the sheer magnitude of the disaster. Benoit Leclair was quoted in the President’s DNA Initiative stating, “Nothing in the history of mass fatality events prepared the forensic community for the complexity of the World Trade Center identification effort” (2006, p.9). Nothing better describes the quandary created by this disaster than the account Amy Zelson-Mundroff gave in the Capstone Document: Mass Fatality Management for Incident Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction:

“The body of an adult man was sent to x-ray for full body radiographs. He had dental and finger prints available, as well as a...