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08/29/03
For 63
years this August 31st, the FBI's Disaster Squad has provided
dedicated and humanitarian service in the difficult but necessary
work of identifying victims of mass disasters and criminal
acts -- from plane crashes to bombings, war crimes to natural
disasters.
How did
it all begin? In August of 1940, a plane whose passengers
included two FBI employees crashed in a Virginia field, killing
all on board. When FBI personnel arrived, the confusion at
the crash site clearly demonstrated the need for a national
"disaster squad" -- experts who could travel to
the scene of a disaster at a moment's notice to assist local
authorities in conducting identification operations and providing
technical advice.
Since
that time, the Disaster Squad has identified over 4000 victims
through fingerprints, palm prints, and footprints, connected
to 225 disasters all over the world. Some incidents are well
known -- the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia explosions,
Operation Desert Storm, the Oklahoma City bombing, TWA Flight
800, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and the terrorist
attacks at the Pentagon, the World Trade Center, and in Pennsylvania
on 9/11/01. More often, though, the Disaster Squad is there
at tragic incidents like mine explosions, bus accidents, and
hurricanes. Today, members of the squad are set up at Dover
Air Force Base to help, as needed, with U.S. operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Who makes
up the Disaster Squad? Certified Forensic Examiners from the
Latent Print Units of the FBI Laboratory. Fifty-seven of them,
in fact, available to travel world-wide at a moment's notice.
They are specially trained to obtain identifiable friction
ridge detail from the skin of victims and to compare and identify
impressions that are extremely difficult to read. They use
the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprinting System (IAFIS),
as well as state and local databases, to help identify victims,
taking remote IAFIS workstations to the scene of the disaster
to search victims' fingerprints against an automated file
containing over 44 million individual fingerprint records.
And they work side-by-side with agencies like the Federal
Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety
Board, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the local
Medical Examiners Offices, and whatever FBI field division
has jurisdiction.
How are
requests made? From many different sources. The ranking law
enforcement official at a disaster scene might make the call.
Or a medical examiner/coroner in charge of victim identification.
Or a ranking official of a public transportation carrier,
the NTSB, the FAA, or a foreign government through the State
Department (in foreign disasters involving U.S. citizens).
For the
past 63 years, it is the human touch that is still so important
to the squad members' mission. Victims' fingerprint and footprint
impressions are still recovered by human hands. And the men
and women of the FBI Disaster Squad are proud to be those
hands. They don't mind the long hours, the stressful conditions,
the lousy weather and fatigue. They stand ready and willing
to respond to the next call, dedicated to bringing closure
to family and friends who have tragically lost a loved one.
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