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Dr Pearson (right) with Singaporean colleague, Dr Tan Peng Hui, at the site
Initial examination and body labelling

For many people in the West, new year's eve 2004 might have been spent planning their evening's celebrations, but for aid workers and survivors of the disaster in South East Asia, it was the furthest thing from their minds.

The team at the makeshift morgue

Gareth Pearson, a British dentist working in private practice in Singapore, took a plane to Thailand on new year's eve to try to help in the mammoth task of identifying thousands of tsunami victims.

Dr Pearson, who has an MSc in forensic dentistry from the University of Wales, went to a hotel in Surin on the west coast of Phuket where he met with the disaster victim identification (DVI) unit from the Singapore CID, a forensic pathologist, and another forensic dentist, Dr Tan Peng Hui, with a view to participating in the enormous task of identifying the tsunami's victims in Thailand.

“A week after the disaster, still more bodies were being found.”

The centre for the victims was based at Takua Pa temple in Khao Lak, an area in Phang Nga province north of Phuket. This was Thailand's worst affected area and, almost a week after the disaster, still more bodies were being found and moved to the temple.

“Vast swathes of land were deforested; buildings were reduced to rubble.”

He recalls, “New year's day found us at Phuket airport where the Singapore armed forces helicopters were waiting. We boarded the chinooks and settled down for the 40 minute journey to Khao Lak. The flight revealed the devastation below: vast swathes of land deforested, buildings reduced to rubble, boats sitting bizarrely on hill-tops a kilometre inland. These areas would neighbour, quite suddenly, completely untouched areas of land where nothing had happened, palms still swaying, buildings still standing – the pattern defined by the wave's path.”

The helicopter dropped the party on a parched football pitch and they then travelled by car to the nearby temple.

Dr Pearson says, “The first thing that hit us was the smell. I've seen dead bodies before but they were poor preparation for the overwhelming stench which no mask can obscure. One of the Australian policeman described it to me as three-dimensional, much more than just olfactory, it has a taste, almost a feel.”

He describes the scene at the temple as hectic with hundreds of makeshift coffins piled five or six high, people searching vainly for relatives, uncertain policeman attempting to assert a confused authority, TV crews, and some Buddhist monks.

The party was taken to the place where the bodies were being kept. They were met with rows and rows of bodies, some enclosed in plastic, some half covered, some completely exposed, many in a condition that made them no longer identifiable.

The group spent a couple of days putting the mortuary together and a sequence of examination was established.

“Firstly the police took finger prints which was sometimes difficult as fingers tend to 'deglove' after a few days in these conditions. The pathologist performed a cursory autopsy, the mandible was removed and photographs of both jaws taken, after which a detailed dental charting was recorded. Bitewings as well as radiographs of any salient dental features or landmarks were also taken. Following the development, checking and approval of the radiographs, two virgin teeth were extracted for DNA analysis; the flesh was deemed to be of little use in this aspect as it had degraded so badly and was probably contaminated too. However the pulp is protected in its own container,” he says.

Dr Pearson added that at an earlier meeting, the dentists, the anthropologists and the DNA experts agreed that the criteria for tooth extraction would be virgin teeth only, preferably premolar and preferably two teeth. Following extraction the bodies were zipped up and returned to cold storage containers in the temple grounds.

“On several occasions we travelled to the site by van, a three hour journey north through Khao Lak itself. Now a wasteland, it had a vague and unpleasant odour of decomposition. Uprooted trees dotted the landscape, cars sat buckled in half and poignant reminders floated in dirty puddles: a sandal, a shirt, a child's toy.”

“We've all heard the stories people who had babies torn from their arms, mothers deciding which child to hold on to and which to let go of. At the temple, at the airport, seemingly everywhere, are pinned photographs of missing friends and relatives attached to descriptions and messages pleading for information regarding their whereabouts. The death the tsunami brought is a great leveller; it's a very humbling and belittling feeling looking at the indiscriminate nature of the victims: old men, mothers, children, and neonates – the complete spectrum represented. I didn't actually feel emotional until I boarded the plane home when I broke up a little.

“When you're working you're just doing what needs to be done; it's when you're away from the scene that it hits you hard, perhaps there is an unconscious protection mechanism that keeps you going. I've decided that I'm no longer going to complain when I can't find a taxi in the rain or when a patient misses an appointment: it's not that big a deal.

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