Gruesome task at Camp fire scene: 'Some of these people are not going to be identified'

PARADISE, Calif._The search-and-rescue crew was sifting through ashes at a skilled-nursing facility when the radio call came in: a potential discovery a quarter-mile up the road, at the Pine Springs Mobile Home Park.

Within minutes, nearly two dozen people had descended on the smoldering remains of the trailer community in Paradise, the town destroyed by Northern California's Camp fire. Where days before about 60 mobile homes had been clustered under tall evergreen trees, three remained unburned. Recovery workers in white jumpsuits and gray booties, firefighters, coroners' employees and police chaplains from across California began to methodically comb through the soil with rakes and hoes. Volunteers sorted through melted metal and unidentifiable pieces of char for the smallest bits of humanity: teeth, bone fragments, hip replacements � anything that signaled that a person had died in this place of gray cinders and lingering smoke.

After nearly two hours, they had gruesome success. A hearse was summoned, and bags of human remains were loaded inside.

The bleak chore of retrieving bodies is being repeated across this region daily, with no answers for how long the task will take � or how fruitful it will be.

"Some of these people are not going to be identified," said Jesse Dizard, an anthropology professor at nearby California State University, Chico. The university's anthropology department, skilled at identifying skeletal remains, is working to help.

Officials said they had found 76 victims as of Saturday night, an increase of five from the day before. The names of six victims have been released, and the Butte County Sheriff's Office said it has made tentative identifications. More than 1,200 names are on a list of the missing, although officials said some of the names are probably duplicates. Officials have said they expect more deaths, and more discoveries like those at Pine Springs.

Making positive identifications of victims who died in the Camp fire will be painstakingly difficult. Many have been burned beyond recognition. In some cases, just individual bones or fragments are left. If teeth survived, matching them with dental records will be difficult in a town where some dentists' offices burned along with nearly everything else. Even DNA analysis won't be easy, because of the scarcity of remains and the heat to which they were exposed.

"We're finding remains in various states," Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea said. "I suspect there are some that will have been completely consumed."

Search-and-rescue teams can take hours to collect a single victim �� trying to make sure that bones or other body parts aren't left behind for relatives and friends to find when they return.

Still, "there is certainly the unfortunate possibility that even after we've searched an area, once people get back in there, it's possible that human remains could be found," Honea said. "I know that's a very difficult thing to think about, but that's the difficult situation we find ourselves in today."

A variety of scientific methods, old and new, are being used to identify the Camp fire dead. Mobile DNA labs have been sent to Butte County to collect samples from survivors at the same time that firefighters are poking through the blackened hulls of automobiles for vehicle identification numbers.

Victims are being shipped in refrigerated trucks to the Sacramento County morgue for identification and officials say progress is being made.

Honea said he's encouraged that the state Department of Justice, which is overseeing the collection of DNA samples from victims and surviving relatives, is getting help from a Colorado DNA company called ANDE, which sent a dozen employees to the area.

The company brought seven of its Rapid DNA analysis devices, which spokeswoman Annette Mattern described as "a laboratory in a box," to Butte County. ANDE is donating its services.

The heat generated by California's deadliest wildfire will complicate matters. At its peak, the inferno may have reached temperatures exceeding 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit. It could be impossible in some cases to obtain DNA samples from the victims, thwarting what is often the identification method used when all else fails.

"The severity, the blaze, the burning � who knows what DNA is left?" said Colleen Fitzpatrick, founder of an Orange County consulting company called Identifinders International. "You need a certain amount of DNA."

DNA samples have been obtained from materials exposed to ultra-high temperatures, including a backpack destroyed by a pipe bomb. But Sacramento County Coroner Kimberly Gin, whose morgue is the center of identification efforts, agreed that fire can sometimes obliterate genetic clues.

"Fires are always the worst because if you have to go to DNA, it's kind of harder with burned remains," Gin said.

DNA identification can be particularly difficult when only small bone fragments are available. To extract DNA from a bone, pathologists have to destroy part of it. Examiners are sometimes reluctant to do that "because that may be the last bit of that person," said Anthony Falsetti, a forensic anthropologist at George Mason University in Virginia.

"When the sample is consumed by the testing, then you have no more sample to test again if the technology changes," he said.

Technological improvements are enabling DNA identifications even from the smallest pieces of bone. In July, the New York City chief medical examiner announced that the office had identified a victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 17 years after the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed, using a newer technique called "ultrasonic ball bearings." The process involves pulverizing a bone with a piece of metal, and extracting bits of DNA from the resulting fragments.

Even with new methods, about 40 percent of the victims at the World Trade Center � about 1,100 people � haven't been positively identified.

Jim Wood, a dentist who is also a Democratic assemblyman from Santa Rosa, helped identify victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. He also spent weeks identifying about two dozen victims from the California wine country fires in October 2017.

"It's hard to say, but I've been through this before," he said.

Wood arrived in the Paradise area last week to help again. He said dental records are often the quickest and cheapest method of identifying remains, because of the durability of teeth.

"Teeth are still the hardest substance in the body," he said.

Wood said forensic dentists have sometimes identified remains even if the teeth are mostly destroyed.

"We would have just fragments of teeth, no jawbones," he said. "We comb through everything we can to make an identification."

He acknowledged that the particularly dire circumstances of the Camp fire might make dental identifications more difficult: At least some of Paradise's dental offices went up in smoke, taking patient records with them. Wood said he's looking for alternative sources of records, such as Medi-Cal, as backups.

"We're actively building dental records with anything we can," he said.

Many of the search-and-rescue teams are assisted by forensic anthropologists, including several dozen students and professors from Chico State. The anthropologists weed out nonhuman finds, including dog or cat bones, and can use human bones to find clues about the dead.

The length of a thighbone, for example, can provide an estimate of the person's height, said Alexandra Perrone, supervisor of Chico State's Human Identification Laboratory. Other remains may contain evidence that the person had a hip or knee replacement, she said _ allowing identification through medical records.

"Forensic anthropologists can estimate sex, age, ancestry, stature, pathology," she said.

Despite the many methods being used to bring names to the dozens of Camp fire victims, there is a real possibility there will be no closure on some cases. The best that authorities may be able to do is make an educated guess by where the remains are found.

Honea said he's wary of relying on "circumstantial evidence" � such as identifying a person because they were found at a particular address. That kind of deduction "provides the least certainty," Honea said.

As the search and identification process continues, Wood said he and others feel the responsibility of doing the work carefully, and the emotional weight of handling so many remains.

As he heard that the Camp fire had devoured most of Paradise, Wood started having flashbacks, he said.

"When I started to see the numbers (of victims) rise here, it brought back a whole flood of emotions from what we went through last year," Wood said.