The Associated Press
CLARENCE — Experts who helped identify victims from Flight 93’s crash in a Pennsylvania field on 9/11 have joined the search for remains from a commuter plane’s crash site outside Buffalo.
Continental Flight 3407 dropped from the sky late Thursday night onto a suburban Buffalo home, killing all 49 people on board the plane and one person in the house.
The job of identifying remains takes time, experts said, which can be difficult for grieving families.
“You have to have a balance,” said Wallace Miller, the Somerset County coroner who helped identify the victims of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pa., on Sept. 11, 2001.
“You want to give the families closure — but it has to be a painstaking, step-by-step process,” Miller said.
Compared to other commercial plane crashes, the debris field in Clarence is tiny. It takes up the house and the property lot. In Shanksville, it covered 70 acres.
But the plane crashing into a house adds a different dimension to the recovery effort, with the debris from the plane and the home intermingling, said Steve Chealander, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the crash, along with the FBI.
Chealander has likened the effort to an excavation, and said the recovery of human remains “has priority” over other parts of the investigation.
Erie County Health Commissioner Anthony Billittier said the recovery of bodies could be completed by Wednesday. The first remains were pulled from the scene late Friday, less than 24 hours after the crash.
Billittier said searchers are finding a combination of whole remains and small pieces. Some victims were found still sitting with their seat belts on, law enforcement officials said.
The effort to recover was being led by Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic anthropologist from Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., and a nationally renowned expert who was part of the recovery effort at Shanksville. Graduate students were also involved.
Crash scenes are plotted in grids and corridors and visually inspected by teams of professionals and trained volunteers that flag any suspected remains they find.
Using electronic precision surveying equipment, another group maps the site and records the location of the material. A third group takes photographs.
Dirkmaat said the process of recovering remains is more streamlined than in the past.
“Before you would walk a site and find as much as you could for a few days. Then back off. Collect it and take it to the morgue,” Dirkmaat said.
“In this process, as soon as you find material, it can come off site and go to the morgue. The morgue is running at the same time the field operation is going on,” he said.
Even with modern equipment and a well-defined mapping strategy, searchers still must get down on their hands and knees to scour a site for remains.
“It can be an emotionally difficult job, but I tell my students you have to divorce yourself from what happened,” he said.
Dirkmaat said what helps him tackle his job is focusing on the comfort he and his colleagues can bring to families.
Remains recovered from the Flight 3407 site are bagged and taken with a police escort to the Erie County medical examiner’s office, where a refrigerated trailer has been set up as a temporary morgue. A federal team of experts will help local medical examiners identify the victims.
