If you are concerned about an expat you know in Thailand, you can check in at this board.
Keep in mind it is a much smaller board that is having its bandwidth stretched beyond its limit at the moment.
Is there any protocal for preserving tissue samples of bodies that are unclaimed, but which must be buried for health reasons?
The supermodel on the 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition was found clinging to a tree after eight hours.
No sign of her photographer boyfriend.
And to accompany the article there’s a photograph of her… hip-deep in water. Classy.
I just remembered. Near Phangna (which was hard hit) there is a Muslim fishing village at Koh Panyi. There’s some pictures of it at the link I’ve posted, but the thing is basically a bunch of homes and shops built on stilts above the water. I wonder if it’s even still there?
She had a broken pelvis. The amount of force necessary to break a pelvis in a healthy young woman is staggering to me.
Death toll now pushing 60,000 and expected to more than double after epidemics.
Even if there were, I doubt there’d be sufficient freezer space and facilities to do tissue typing later. Even if the bureaucracy was in place (highly, highly unlikely,There are some areas here, especially in the north, where the only hospital for an entire province has one surgeon and six physicians,) they’d be better off photographing each body before burying it.
Mass graves have already begun to be filled.
Wow, way bigger then I expected.
2.6 meters in Mexico!!! Damn.
The toll is now up to at least 68,000.
Apparently there’s been about 50 aftershocks (as of now), with one as high as 7.5 on the Richter scale. However, they say that these aftershocks won’t pose a further tsunami risk.
whoops… hit “Submit” too soon.
It looks like the aftershocks likely won’t cause more tsunamis, but they will still be powerful enough to hamper relief effort a great deal.
From the last link I gave:
Just read a blurb about how one woman working at a temple* in Khao Lak is taking swabs of victims mouths and hair samples. Her hope is that they can do DNA matches later. She thinks this is not being done at the other two temples in the area.
*Buddhist temples are where the dead are taken, traditionally in Thailand, to await cremation.
A co-worker of mine was in Phuket with her boyfriend (also a co-worker). We were very worried when we heard about the Tsunami. They called us on Monday to say they were OK.
They were in the water when the Tsunami happened. Both survived, only slightly injured. Their hotel room was destroyed, all possessions, papers, clothes are gone.
But they are alive, thank Og! I hope they will return safely …
Death toll tops 71,000.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/29/asia.quake/index.html
Still climbing.
CNN places the current death toll above 116,000, with 80,000 of those being in Indonesia alone.
I don’t know how they arrive at these, by body count or estimate. But I’m still holding out hope that many of the missing are just cut off from communications and that some of these numbers will get revised down in time, similar to what happened after the initial estimates with 9/11.
I hope you’re right on this… it just keeps getting worse!
Weren’t the initial estimates on Sept 11 something like 10,000? That was based, in part, on how many people worked at the WTC. They didn’t realize until later that 99% of the people who could get out, did get out.
I know they’re digging deep trenches to bury the bodies. Are there any sort of counts being kept, or are they just digging the holes and covering them up?
We may never know how many.
We’ll never know how many. Whole familes and neighborhoods were wiped out, and I doubt a lot of the communities kept census records. They’re still arguing about how many died in the Galveston hurricane and the San Francisco earthquake/fire. Something on this scale, they’ll just have to guess.
I certainly saw figures like 30,000 being bandied about, early on.
With the tsunamis, though, I’m pretty certain that these figures will be underestimates, simply because many of the bodies will never be found, and nobody who would miss them survived either
It’s not like the WTC, where the destruction, although horrific, was very localised and so whole families/communities were not likely to be wiped out. This is on a different scale altogether.