“I found it horrifying that there were these boards of photographs of rotting, decomposing bodies, and families would walk up and down trying to pick which one belonged to them. It’s horrifying for those families. Dreading, dreading that they’ll find someone they recognise, and dreading not.”
Professor Richard Bassed is a forensic odontologist and was one of the team of experts who helped identify the victims in the Boxing Day tsunami.
He recalled the life changing experience in a chapter of Meshel Laurie’s book CSI Told You Lies.
Disclaimer: The following is an excerpt from CSI Told You Lies by Mishel Laurie, specifically the chapter titled “Floods and Flames.” It has been shared with permission to provide insight into the experiences of the VIFM staff during the aftermath of the Boxing Day tsunami.
As significant life markers go, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires are notable in anyone’s language. Coming as they did just over four years apart, they represent some clear turning points in Dr Bassed’s life, and they cast long shadows over his philosophical perspective, both professionally and personally. When he got the call-up to assist with victim identification after the Boxing Day tsunami it was his first big overseas forensic job, a career milestone. It also came at a personal low point, as he was newly divorced.
‘I was staying with my parents. I had no money and nowhere else to stay so I was back on the farm. When the tsunami call came through and I said yes, I really wanted to go.’
On the morning of 26 December 2004, a massive earth quake shook the ocean floor off the west coast of northern Sumatra, Indonesia, at 7.58 am local time. Measuring 9.1 on the seismic magnitude scale, it was a ‘megathrust earth quake’, meaning it was caused by one tectonic plate sliding underneath another one and was one of the most powerful earthquakes possible on Earth. Millions of people who lived along the shoreline of the Indian Ocean – in countries like Thailand, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, Malaysia and the Maldives to name a few – were affected. And due to the timing of the earthquake, just after Christmas, those countries were also hosting millions of holiday-makers from around the world.
Along with the Indonesian island of Bali, the island of Phuket off the west coast of Thailand is popular as the first overseas adventure for many Australians. It has accommodation options for everyone, from the once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon, to the family-friendly fortnight and cheap and nasty end-of-season trip with the boys. The entertainment options are equally broad, with Bangla Road in Patong being the road to either avoid or direct the taxi straight to from the airport, depending on the purpose of your trip. Some things never seem to change.
But things have changed a lot since 2004. Consider how long it takes now for a silly celebrity social media post to be heard around the world. Then try to imagine how two hours after the tsunami had levelled massive areas of the city of Banda Aceh in Indonesia, a city that’s just 200 kilometres away as the crow flies over the Gulf of Thailand, millions of people in Thailand still didn’t know about the tsunami at all.
The tsunami swept through Banda Aceh in three massive waves just twenty minutes after the earthquake, killing tens of thousands of people. Yet somehow the major international resort island of Phuket wasn’t warned. The quake itself was felt by many people on Phuket. As if that wasn’t bad enough, an hour after the tsunami hit Phuket, it hit Chennai in India, which was similarly unprepared. Ten thousand people, mostly women and children, died in the Chennai area that day.
The first iPhone didn’t hit the market until 2007. In 2004, we were still years away from spending our beach days scrolling through our phones, which I would suggest is how the tsunami sneaked up on so many people that day. There were many handicams at the beach, though.
In the days and weeks after Boxing Day, innumerable home videos played out on the news, in which puzzled holiday makers watched on from busy beaches while the water beneath them slipped away. Out, out, out, all the way out it went in the eeriest manner, leaving the ocean bed bare. Parents can be heard in every language of the world attempting to explain the phenomenon to their children as a slightly darker blue line appears on the horizon. Ominously, small sunburnt children with beaded hair frolic carelessly on the wet sand right out the front. Their parents squint and shade their eyes as they try to make out what’s happening out there.
As it draws closer, the blue line turns white at the top and then breaks on the fishing boats, tossing them like bathtub toys. The voices on the videos often marvel delightedly at first. What a wonder! And to think I actually have it on film!
But the wave doesn’t subside like normal waves do, this one surges forward and forward and still forward as if it’s never going to stop coming. As it swallows up the fragile timber furniture of the local sellers it actually appears to be gaining momentum. It’s like it’s feeding on things in its path. The parents start to get nervous. They’re not smiling anymore. They’re snatching up the children and running.
Most eyes and cameras are trained inland now, confused by the water advancing through the resorts and streets, when the second wave crashes behind them. It’s so much bigger and more forceful than the first one. It’s the second wave that will do much of the structural damage.
The second wave will smash windows, sheer off balconies and destroy entire buildings. It will sweep it all up, along with every man, woman and child at ground level and stir them all up together. It will turn timber posts and corrugated iron roofs into deadly spears and razor blades. One survivor described it as ‘like being thrown around in a washing machine full of nails’. 3 Survivors, who, by a twist of fate, stood on balconies above the third floor of buildings built strong enough to withstand the water, watched helplessly as wave after wave surged below. The cries of the frightened and injured grew fewer in number with every subsiding swell until at last there were no more cries.
Five days later, Dr Richard Bassed arrived at Phuket Airport.
‘They put us up in the fanciest hotel up at the northern end of Phuket. We walked into this fancy hotel and it was all opulent. Thai people in traditional costumes handing us cocktails, “sah-wah-dee”, bowing and everything. Porters carrying our bags to the room with a giant king-sized bed and a big balcony with a view over the ocean. I’m sitting there and then all of a sudden I think, “What’s that smell?”
‘The mortuary, or the temple, was only three or four kilometres away . . . and you could smell it. So, it was a really strange juxtaposition of being treated like we’re on a holiday but the constant reminder through this smell that we were at work.
‘We left for work at 6 am every morning and got back at about eight o’clock every night. Probably twenty or thirty bodies a day. One rest day a week and we did three-week rotations. That first time was really hard work. That’s when all the bodies were all disorganised, they were still bringing them in, they were still collecting them, they were all swelling up in the sun. We were building dry-ice igloos to try and keep the bodies cold because they had no shipping containers there yet.’
In Phuket the average daily maximum temperature in December is 33 degrees Celsius. The average daily minimum temperature is 25 degree Celsius, for that matter, and the humidity hovers around 80 per cent. Before the ‘igloos’ were invented by building a small wall of dry ice around a group of bodies and then covering the group with a tent or tarpaulin, lumps of dry ice were simply sat on top of the blackening corpses, which were laid out in rows around the temple. Lying the ice on top of the bodies was not only visually horrifying but most ineffectual. The dry ice damaged the top area of the body upon which it sat, while having virtually no chilling effect whatsoever on the underside.
After a full two weeks where Richard and others tried to keep the remains cool, refrigerated shipping containers finally arrived and thousands of bodies were carefully moved into them, with Richard mucking in as usual. But just as some kind of order appeared to be descending on the scene a rather disruptive directive came down from the Thai government. It demanded that the remains of Thai locals be separated from foreigners, immediately.
Most of us, like the members of the Thai Government, probably have no idea why the international team of forensic clinicians in Phuket found the order so preposterous three weeks after the tsunami. I can tell you it had nothing to do with political correctness or everyone being equal in death.
‘We sent them a photo,’ says Richard, ‘of this giant temple area full of black, bloated bodies, all looking identical. You wouldn’t know if one was Thai or German or African. I mean, if they could tell the locals from the foreigners by then, they were doing better than us!’
For many reasons, this particular DVI job would be one of the longest ever undertaken.
‘The biggest problem with the tsunami was that they recovered all these bodies and brought them to the temple because that’s what they do in Thailand. That’s their custom. When you die they bring you to the temple. Wat Yan Yao, it was. But they didn’t record where they got the body from. Half these bodies were found in their hotel rooms, so they could’ve been so easily identified but once they were removed from their rooms we just had no context and no idea. So we had to fully examine every single deceased person and we had to examine them over and over and over again because they kept stuffing up the numbering system. They get the numbering wrong and all of a sudden, you’ve got to start again because you don’t know which body’s which anymore. You don’t know which bit of paper relates to which body.
‘You’d open a body bag with a number on it, and there’d be another body bag inside it with a different number on it. You’d open it and there’s a tag with a different number.’
‘We’d do a full dental chart, X-rays of everybody, we’d take a DNA sample, which involved taking one of their teeth, a back tooth that had no fillings, and we’d also take a section of their femur.’
‘They couldn’t find a DNA lab that would test the specimens because DNA was very expensive back then. They eventually found a lab in China that would do it. Seven hundred samples were sent over to China and they got back one positive result. The lab just couldn’t do it. Too many contamination issues. People were using the same saw to cut the femur out of fifty different bodies …’
‘It was just very poor quality control. There were people there not to do any work. Just there for the fun of it.’
Listening to him speak about the work identify ing people after the tsunami, it dawns on me just how different it was from the work of the MH17 victim identification team. I’d already started researching that set-up in anticipation of speaking with one of Richard’s colleagues who’d attended the scene of the plane crash. I knew that after Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine in 2014, the recovery mission was fraught but the forensic work itself was swift and dignified. It took place at a pristine, state-of the-art temporary laboratory in Hilversum Airfield in the Netherlands.
As I realise I’ve allowed myself to drift off, imagining the Hilversum space, I have to hold my hands up to interrupt Richard because I can’t quite find any words to explain my confusion about the difference between that and what he’s describing in Thailand. All I can manage is a stupefied ‘But why?’
‘Why what?’ he asks patiently.
‘Why was this so different to Hilversum?’ I ask, as though he’s somehow ruined something for me.
Even though Richard wasn’t part of the MH17 victim identification team he needs no further clarification. He knows exactly what I’m asking.
‘Just the numbers,’ he says. ‘The number of people that died and the fact that two-and-a-half thousand people who died on Phuket were from multiple different countries. ‘There were lots of arguments about who was going to be in charge. It ended up that the Australians were in charge for the first six months because we’d done the Bali bombings. The Americans weren’t interested. They didn’t come because there were only one or two Americans that died.’
It’s at this point I realise how political these recovery missions are.
Quite simply, after the downing of MHl7 the Dutch government was dealing with 283 victims, most of whom were Dutch. Therefore the Dutch assembled the best equipment and the thirty best pathologists in the world, to get the job done in the most dignified fashion possible. The Dutch, and many others, believed and still do that Putin’s Russia is to blame for the incident and the matter continues to be prosecuted at both diplomatic and legal levels.
The Boxing Day tsunami, a cataclysmic natural disaster, is estimated to have killed in excess of 230,000 people across a multilingual, multi-faith, ethnically diverse and politically contentious diaspora of developing nations taking in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, the Maldives, Burma, Somalia, South Africa and Malaysia. Add to that, as Richard mentioned, the region is a holiday destination for people from all over the world. There simply was no government well placed, financially or otherwise, to assume leadership in the aftermath of the tsunami as the Dutch had done post MHl7. And a recovery effort of this magnitude required the same thirty best people in the world who were called up to Hilversum, plus around three hundred more, which explains how some less-than-stellar applicants were working on the tsunami identification.
‘It was the largest DVI ever done and the first time this many pathologists, from this many countries, had got together to do something. So it was weird. It was a weird thing to do and I know it sounds like … why would anyone want to do that? But the closest I can describe it is like the way you read in books and see in movies the camaraderie between soldiers who’ve been in battle together. You build up this really close relationship really quickly with people that you’ve never seen before and never met before – coppers, doctors, there were Thai army guys – and you’re all experiencing this terrible thing together. You build an incredible camaraderie. And who’d want to be a dentist?’
‘You could’ve been an orthodontist,’ I remind him as he laughs. ‘You could be making millions.’
‘What a boring life!’
I remind him of his earlier, more noble response and he begrudgingly acquiesces. ‘And yes, I do feel like it’s what I was put here to do. It’s the thing I can do, for a number of reasons, that most people can’t and so it’s my opportunity to contribute to the greater good, I suppose.’
He continues, ‘But because I was there intermittently over the course of a year, I got to see when it became more organised and when it became more rational. After that first episode at the temple, the Norwegians flew in a sort of prefab hospital. It was these giant, long tunnels of put together buildings that they flew in with helicopters. Then we had to re-examine everybody again.’
Richard laughs at this, although it’s a laugh of exhaustion rather than amusement, even after all these years. It’s a laugh-or-you’ll-cry laugh. He fixes me with his wounded, challenging look and adds, ‘By then they were really decomposing.’
It turns out those shipping containers weren’t exactly consistent in their refrigeration capabilities.
‘The shipping containers were stacked up on top of each other, three high, all around us. Hundreds of shipping containers with probably forty bodies in each one. You’ve been to Thailand, you’ve seen the wiring. They’d bring these containers in and they’d have blokes on the roof with sticks, pushing the power lines out of the way so the containers could get through.’
Evidently, some of those low-hanging wires carrying electricity to the shipping containers were damaged during that process.
‘Some bodies are frozen, some are not frozen and every now and then a container breaks down. There was one that no one noticed for about a month. The only way we found out about it was because of the chickens who started congregating underneath it and pecking at the sand the fluids were leaking onto. They were christened the “cadaver chickens”. The doors were bulging on it. I was one of the people who had to go in and clean that out.’
Even a farm boy has his limits. Surely the day Richard had to nudge the cadaver chickens aside to clean out the broken-down shipping container in the heat and humidity of Thailand after months of examining and re-examining remains was a low point that left some emotional imprint. Camaraderie is only going to carry you so far.
‘My mum and dad used to say, “We’re all going to get eaten by worms one day.”’
Mixed with the usual humidity, cooking smoke and spices and the smells of the DVI, the atmosphere was heavy with grief. Many families, local and foreign alike, waited close to the temporary mortuary for months on end, hoping every day for news. Hoping to take a loved one home.
‘I found it horrifying that there were these boards of photographs of rotting, decomposing bodies, and families would walk up and down trying to pick which one belonged to them. It’s horrifying for those families. Dreading, dreading that they’ll find someone they recognise, and dreading not.
‘And really, there’s just no hope, right? They still do it now in mass disasters around the world. It’s just a waste of time and it ends up with wrong identifications. Someone takes the wrong body home and then you’ve made two mistakes.
‘In my later rotations we were actually releasing bodies. We had to do this pre-release check. Every time someone was identified by DNA or dental records or whatever, they had to check all the paperwork, check this, check that, then I had to re-check the body. Then the family would be waiting outside. If it was a Thai family, the body would be given to them, in a coffin, just outside, under, believe it or not, a tent that had a Sprite logo on it. Then they’d carry it about two hundred metres down the road to a tap and they’d open the coffin, take every bone out and wash it before putting them all back in the coffin.
‘I was so wired for the whole three weeks every time I went over there. I’d come home and I’d be miserable. It was so confusing. There were monks wandering around … it was surreal, but it was also exciting. I thought, “I’m doing some real good and I’m helping people get their families back,” so it really felt like the defining point of my career … up until that point.’
Thousands of children were killed just in Phuket during the Boxing Day tsunami. Without mentioning that fact specifically, I ask if Richard found it harder to keep in regular touch with his own young children while he was in Thailand, or if it made him need to hear their voices more. ‘Definitely more,’ he says without hesitation. ‘I talked to them on the phone a lot. Actually, I did have terrible nightmares about them after that, though, for a long time.’ He looks me straight in the eyes. ‘They were dead and I had to wash their hair in a sink. One by one.’
‘Do you still have that nightmare?’ I ask him after a long pause.
‘No, I haven’t had it in years. I’d forgotten about it, actually.’
He switches tone, dearly swapping the shaky memory for a stronger one. ‘They actually came and stayed in the apartment with me a bit during the Black Saturday period,’ he says jauntily.
I’m shocked by the thought that, after a day of identifying the remains of bushfire victims, a slumber party with three teenage girls would seem relaxing but he assures me they were great nights, even if he did smell like a bonfire no matter how hard he scrubbed in the shower.
Clearly, by the time the calls started coming through about the bushfires, Dr Richard Bassed was in a more confident place in his life. He held a much more senior position at VIFM and was asked to attend some of the scenes with police on the Monday and Tuesday after the fires, to help recover remains.
‘There were one hundred and forty-five death scenes, but they called us to some of the ones where they thought they might have trouble separating one individual from another. We had to try and work out which body part belonged to which person because often they were all huddled together. You know? When the fires came over, they huddled together.
‘The scene that really got me, there was three people – Mum, Dad and the kid – who had an underground bunker that was about ten feet from the back door of their kitchen. They were found in between the back door of their house, which was gone, burnt to the ground, but where it would’ve been, and the door of the bunker, which was perfectly safe. ‘I said to the firey, “How come they didn’t make it?” The house was on a hill, and then there was a valley below it and then another hill facing the house. And he said, “The fire came over that hill opposite. They mustn’t have known it was corning until they saw it pop up over the hill and it would’ve been rocketing along at forty kilometres an hour. By the time they ran out the back door, it’s got to the top of that hill and then here at this house it would’ve been a thousand degrees. They didn’t even have time.”
‘The heat, that far in front of the fire would have just killed them. Breathing in super-heated air.
‘The thing that was difficult was that there were lots of scenes that we should’ve gone to but we didn’t, just because we couldn’t get there. There were fires still burning in some places. Like, there was one scene where there were nine people from five different families in the same house. All these people went round to this house because it was the only brick house in the street and they were aged from three to eighty-something. That was difficult because the police recovered that scene and there were nine people and they came back with something like twenty-six body bags.
‘It took weeks and weeks and weeks to actually physically sort it out, whereas if we had’ve gone up to the scene in the first place it would’ve been a little bit easier. A burnt tooth to a policeman just looks like a burnt rock or some thing, but I can tell the difference immediately. I can tell the difference between a human tooth and a dog’s tooth. We ended up with a lot of those.
‘Some people were identified relatively quickly. Intact bodies, who were found at an address, you ring up their family and find out who their dentist was, get their dental records in the next day, then you can identify them relatively quickly. But then you’ve got people found in a car or in the forest, then you’ve got no idea. Then you’ve got to compare them to all the dental records you’ve got of all the people who’ve been reported missing. And when you’ve got really tiny, fragmentary remains, then you’ve got to reconstruct them first.
‘There was a lot of teaching police and ambos about fragile body retrieval. A lot of bubble wrap and hairspray,’ he says, uncrossing and recrossing his legs.
Naturally I’m interested to know where and how people unwind after long days of this work, whenever slumber parties with daughters aren’t on the cards. Again, Richard’s personal growth during the four-year gap between the two disasters reveals itself.
‘There’s a little cafe down the road, it was called Blondies then, and I booked it out for the three months we worked through the Black Saturday DVI. So we could just go there for breaks and to download. We’d all go there at the end of every day for a few drinks and then I’d go to the IGA and buy a box of noodles for dinner. I’d put the telly on and watch anything but the news. I didn’t watch the news for months.
‘You can’t get rid of the smell. It was the same in Thailand. Different smell, but the same in that it got in everywhere and you couldn’t escape it. Nothing gets rid of it. Sticking stuff up your nose and all that, none of it works. You’ve just got to get used to it.
‘In Thailand we used to go to a bar every night but it was very different. It was called the Timber Hut and it rocked. It was packed every night with people working on the tsunami: medical people, police, army guys, everyone just blowing off steam. It had this balcony that used to shake under the weight of the party and we’d joke about when it was going to come crashing down.
‘You know, I actually went back there a few years later and it was really weird. I was on holiday with my girl friend, who is now my wife, and some friends and the guys behind the bar remembered me and it was all exactly the same but for some reason I got really angry and upset. It’s never happened before or since. It was really weird. The guys we were with were saying it was boring and they wanted to go somewhere else and it made me really angry. They just didn’t get it.’
Richard doesn’t do as much ‘on the tools’, as he puts it, these days.
‘I feel like I’ve done that. I feel like I’ve kind of outgrown that. My main focus now is on researching better ways to do stuff. I spend my whole life on developing research projects that will help us be more efficient. For instance, one project I’ve got going now is developing a facial recognition algorithm for the dead. So if you ever get five thousand dead people in one place again like after the tsunami, before they decompose, someone will just take a photo of every single face with their iPhone. Then we can use facial recognition software to compare them to all the driver’s licence photos, identity photos and passport photos. So families won’t be walking around trying to find people anymore.
‘The research is much more interesting for me now, but I’m sure if another big thing happened, I’d be the first one trying to get on the plane!’