Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/1208031
T M C P U L S E | F E B R U A R Y 2 02 0 5 "I didn't really know what to do, so I started reaching out to the county resources and to the city and it quickly became evident that I couldn't write a mass fatality pre- paredness plan for our office—that it has to be the county," Wiersema said. "But then, as I started talking to people in the county, it became obvious that it would have to be the county and the city, since we serve both." The more Wiersema learned, the more the project's scope expanded. Soon, the plan was slated to serve the entire state of Texas, in part because resources vary so widely from region to region. "The death investigation system in Texas is extremely variable in capability," Wiersema said, adding that Harris County has the largest medical examiner's office in the state, with nearly 300 employees. "We have 60 staff just in inves- tigations alone, so those are the people that go to the scenes and do really detailed death investiga- tions. ... That's 24 hours a day. We have 17 or 18 pathologists conduct- ing autopsies, four anthropolo- gists, we've got toxicology, drug chemistry, DNA trace evidence, histology—doing the job that, in a neighboring county, has to be done by only one person," Wiersema explained. "And that one person may not have any training at all in forensics or medicine. They're tasked with the same thing, of course on a much smaller scale, but that doesn't matter at all if 10 peo- ple die acutely in their jurisdiction. Until TMORT, there was really no formal mechanism for them to get any sort of assistance." The need for this kind of pro- gram has grown as mass casualty events have increased in number and complexity over time. ® There's this misconception that we're just picking up bodies and transporting them, but it's so much more than that, and I think that's part of what is so valuable about TMORT. It's going and doing real forensic science. — JASON WIERSEMA, PH.D. Director of forensic anthropology and emergency management at Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences