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March 29, 2010
ALL THAT REMAINS
TU professor helps
uncover American
bodies in Haiti
LAUREN SLAVIN
Arts Editor
In temperatures reaching close to 100 degrees, even through
a protective face mask, you can smell the rotting corpses.
Everywhere you look, you are surrounded by bodies of the
dead: bodies in mass graves, bodies being burned, bodies
decomposing, bodies being eaten by hungry animals. When
the backhoes can no longer sort through the rubble where a
five-star hotel once stood, you will use your hands to dig for a
body that may not even be there.
This isn’t a nightmare; this is Dana Kollmann's job.
When the assistant professor isn’t teaching Towson
University students Advanced Forensic Investigation and
Introduction to Forensic Crime Analysis, she is part of the
Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a federal
asset under the Department of Health and Human Services.
The DMORT mission is to offer mortuary assistance in cases
of mass fatality. Mass fatality is defined as anything that
overwhelms the local medical examiner’s office, according to
Kollmann.
Kollmann worked in DMORT’s forensic anthropology divi¬
sion in their first international mission: to find the bodies of
Americans who were killed during the earthquake on Jam 12,
2010.
In 35 seconds, the Caribbean nation went from being the
third poorest country in the world to the first, with more than
100,000 people killed from collapsing buildings.
Similar to the National Guard, DMORT responds mostly
to emergencies within the United States, such as Hurricane
Katrina and the Flight 93 crash on Sept. 11, 2001, near
Shanksville, Pa.
“We’re watching this unfold on the news and we’re think¬
ing, 'Gosh, we have the resources to take care of this,’"
Kollmann said. “I said to my husband ... ‘That would be a
wonderful opportunity for DMORT, but it’s in Haiti, we would
never go."'
But the need for relief was so great that officials from
DMORT flew to Haiti shortly after the earthquake to arrange
with the government how Americans could be of service dur¬
ing this national disaster. The Haitian government negotiated
that DMORT could bring a team to identify the bodies of dead
Americans.
“That was awesome that we had that responsibility, but it
was also devastating because there [are] 233,000 Haitians dead
and we’re there for essentially 180 Americans," Kollmann said.
The team and their portable morgue, which can be up and
running in less than 24 hours, were sent to Port-au-Prince on
February 24 for a two-week mission.
Once in Haiti, Kollmann spent about half of her time in
the field, searching for the dead alongside the mortuary affairs
division of the army, and the other half working in the morgue.
“The work that you do is just so emotionally taxing and
nasty," Kollmann said. "Decomposing bodies in 98.6 degree
heat in a tent, which is what the morgue was set up in. The
air conditioning only works when it feels like it."
The DMORT workers were forced to stop to drink every 15
See HAITI, page 10
Workers sort through rubble in the remains
of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince,
Haiti. This was one of the many
locations where Dana
Kollmann searched
for the bodies of
missing Americans.
Courtesy of Dana Kollmann
