Talk Turns Grisly inTerror-Victim Recovery

ByABC News
December 5, 2001, 12:33 PM

— -- Talk turns grisly in discussion of recovering 'vaporized' Trade Center victims, the federal cyber-security boss wants high-speed Internet providers to do more for Net security, doctors are preparing for a bioterror attack at the Salt Lake City Olympics, and the tabloid publisher hit by anthrax may leave Florida.

Talk of 'Vaporized' People in WTC Collapse

N E W Y O R K, Dec. 4 Three months after the World Trade Center attack, victims' families are being forced to face the ghastly possibility that many of the dead were "vaporized," as the medical examiner put it, and may never be identified.

So far, fewer than 500 victims have been positively identified out of the roughly 3,000 feared dead. Sixty were identified solely through DNA.

The city and state have allowed victims' families to obtain death certificates without proof of a body, but many families place great importance on an ID based on actual remains.

"Until you have something tangible, you just keep hoping maybe there'll be some sort of miracle," said Jeanne Maurer, whose 31-year-old daughter, Jill Campbell, is presumed dead. "You can't accept it until you have something.

"I still say, `My daughter's missing,"' Maurer said.

Many victims will undoubtedly be identified. Nearly 10,000 body parts have been pulled from the mountains of mangled metal and matchstick-size splinters at ground zero.

But Dr. Charles Hirsch, the chief medical examiner, triggered an angry response two weeks ago when he told grieving relatives that many bodies no one is sure how many had been "vaporized" and were beyond identification.

Hirsch declined to be interviewed. But spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said he meant that bodies were consumed by blazing fuel from the two crashed airliners, or "rendered into dust" when the 1,100-foot skyscrapers collapsed, one concrete slab floor onto another.

Dr. Michael Baden, the state's chief forensic pathologist and a top expert in the field, said in September that most bodies should be identifiable because the fires while hot enough to melt steel did not reach the 3,200-degree, 30-minute level necessary to incinerate a body.

Borakove said her office agrees with Baden's calculation as applied to a full body. "But when the planes hit the buildings, the bodies that were in the planes as well as some of the bodies that were in the buildings were fragmented upon impact, and those fragments burn more quickly," she said.