As the wand hovered, the other four people leaned in to inspect the knee. One took photographs; two others began spraying the body with a soapy-looking liquid and scrubbing the skin, paying particular attention to the knee. As they scrubbed, one of them removed a small orange disk, about the size of a quarter, and handed it to the team leader. A tiny, safely encapsulated speck of radioactive strontium—enough to trigger the Geiger counter, but not enough to pose any hazard—simulated contamination on the corpse. Once the scrubbing was complete, the technician with the Geiger counter checked the knee once more. This time the instrument ticked lazily, signaling normal background radiation. At a sign from the team leader, the body was wheeled out of the tent and returned to the trailer that held the other fourteen corpses, which had already undergone similar screening and decontamination procedures.
One by one, the Tyvek-suited figures rinsed off beneath what had to be the world’s coldest shower: a spray of soapy water mixed with alcohol, a last-minute addition necessitated by the day’s subfreezing temperatures. The team’s contamination, like that of the bodies, was simulated, but the goal was to make the training as realistic as possible, despite the added challenges provided by the bitter cold. Only after the shower did the goggles and respirators come off. My red-tressed, freckled graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, emerged from one of the white suits, followed shortly by Art Bohanan, the resident fingerprint expert at the Knoxville Police Department. The team leader was Hank Strickland, a health physicist, one who specialized in radiation and radiation safety. Hank worked at a facility in Oak Ridge called REAC/TS—the Radiation Emergency Assistance Center and Training Site—that sent medical response teams to help treat victims of radiation accidents anywhere in the world.
But Hank, like Miranda and Art, was here today as a volunteer team member of DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. Formed in the early 1990s to identify victims of mass disasters such as airliner crashes and hurricanes, DMORT was part of the U.S. Public Health Service, but the teams were staffed by volunteers with specialized, and even macabre, skills: their ranks included funeral directors, morticians, forensic dentists, physicians, forensic anthropologists, police officers, and fire fighters—people accustomed to working with bodies and bones. DMORT volunteers, including some of my students, had performed heroic service at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center bombings. They’d also spent two months recovering and identifying bodies after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005.
Art himself had spent six weeks in Louisiana after Katrina, lifting fingerprints and palm prints from bloated, rotting corpses. One body was that of a man who’d been trapped in an attic by rising waters. More than a hundred days after the man drowned in the attic—how ironic was that?—Art and a colleague managed to lift a print and ID the man.
DMORT teams were acquainted with death and decay. But this training exercise represented a grim new twist to DMORT’s mission, a response to the nightmare of September 11, 2001. DMORT’s Weapons of Mass Destruction team had been formed shortly after 9/11, in grim recognition of the fact that terrorists who would turn civilian airliners into flying bombs might also attempt acts of wholesale chemical, biological, or nuclear terrorism. Because of the contamination such attacks would create, they would pose unique problems for workers recovering and identifying bodies. The WMD team’s exercise here at the Body Farm was a first step in developing and testing DMORT procedures for handling radiation-contaminated bodies—the sorts of contaminants that would be unleashed, for example, if a radioactive “dirty bomb” were exploded in New York Harbor.
Although it grieved me that nuclear-disaster procedures had to be developed, it made me proud that my research facility could help in the process. The Body Farm was the only place in the world where an emergency-response team like DMORT could simulate a mass disaster realistically, using numerous bodies. Although fifteen bodies was a tiny fraction of the number of victims who would die in an actual dirty-bomb explosion in New York—some estimates put the worst-case number of fatalities from that scenario at fifty thousand or more—fifteen was a place to start, and that was far more bodies than DMORT would be likely to use anyplace else.
Miranda and Art emerged from the decontamination shower stomping their boots and rubbing their arms, their breath steaming in the bitter air. “Sweet Jesus, I am so cold,” said Miranda. I wasn’t getting sprayed with cold water, but I was cold, too; I’d gotten an artificial hip about six months before, when a bullet shattered the top of my left femur, and the cold titanium implant ached deep within my hip. Miranda’s teeth began to chatter. “Whose bright idea was it,” she said, “to do this on the coldest day of the worst cold snap on record?”
“It’s not as fun as reading by the fireplace,” Art said, “but unless you can get the terrorists to attack only when the weather’s nice, it helps to practice in the worst conditions you can.”
“I know, I know,” grumbled Miranda. “It’s just that I’m so cold. After that shower, I might not have an impure thought ever again.”
“I didn’t realize you’d had them before,” said Art. “I didn’t think graduate students had time for such things.”
“Only during spring break,” I said.