What exactly are they recovering? Is it just pieces that are identified by DNA? Is it entire bodies? What condition are the bodies?
I was under the misconception that some bodies were so destroyed that only traces of scattered tissue remained, but reading up on it, it sounds like the remains are actually identifiable as individual human beings. The reason the body count is still so much lower than the number of missing is that the recovery people are treating the site almost like it was an archeological site, removing layer by layer and meticulously noting where remains are found.
They “remove the uppermost layer in a horizontal manner, locate all of the individuals found there,” said Dirkmaat, who worked on recovery and identification of victims from United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11. “You know exactly where they’re located. You can eventually place them in a particular apartment or a particular location.”
Thanks.
This does, however, seem totally inconsistent with the claim that this was a rescue operation until Wednesday when it became a recovery operation.
I suspect that some of that was not wanting to (at least publicly) give up hope of somehow finding additional survivors for as long as possible, even though I imagine that, after the first few days, the crews working the site recognized that the odds of finding anyone alive had dwindled to near zero.
This is necessary, since they still don’t know the cause of the collapse. It’s not merely a search for bodies, but also a search for evidence.
And a rescue search is conducted differently from a recovery search. In a rescue search you’re gonna concentrate more on areas that are more likely to contain people who are still alive, so called void spaces. When it’s switched to a recovery phase you can just start at the top and work your way down.
And a rescue is also going to start at the top. Someone who’s under multiple floors worth of concrete rubble is going to be crushed to death. Anyone who survived is someone who wasn’t crushed, and so is probably only under a fairly thin layer. The exception would be when the debris happened to fall in just the right way that you get something like slabs leaning against each other and not supported by what’s right underneath them, but that’s, first, pretty rare, and second, not all that hard to find.
I heard someone being interviewed on NPR who said that they had to show hopeful family members the way the building pancaked to convince them there wasn’t any real possibility in this case of voids in which a person could survive. I think when a building falls sideways, like in an earthquake, it’s possible for someone to become trapped but alive in a void but not like how this happened.
I thought the most likely place to survive a collapse is at the bottom. This requires a void place as you b stated, which didn’t happen here. To be on the top of the rumble, basically means you fell multiple stories.
[Moderating]
I’ve edited the title for clarity.
I think that you might survive more likely in the outside of the rubble volume…
This includes topside, edges and bottom side… the carpark. carpark, because its structure includes ground, or structure very much more solid … so as to hold all that weight.
anyway, yeah they may be counting thoraxs. They aren’t telling you how many arms and legs they throw in to bodybags… but anyway, as it wasn’t WTC tall, there is less distribution of bits…so they can be more confident in assessing a body is complete, down to the smallest body part they will send for DNA testing. (individual fingers? )