Monday 29 July 2013

Now civilian volunteers to get disaster management training


A force of civilian volunteers is being trained in disaster management and rescue, especially during the monsoons, by North Goa district administration.

The force would mostly comprise well-built people including Physical Education Teachers in various schools, Additional District Collector Dipak Desai told PTI today.

Mumbai-based Sarista Foundation has already began training few batches in the district at various taluka levels, he said adding that advance level training can also be imparted to civilian volunteers on whom the administration can bank on during emergencies. “

"There is no age limit. We also intend to include retired Physical Education teachers. If a person is below 18 years of age, the consent of his parents would be necessary," Desai said adding even students are involved in it.

The officer said that creation of similar force was experimented in South Goa’s Canacona taluka earlier last year and the exercise was very successful.

Desai said that although Goa has not faced any major disaster so far, the co-ordination of civilians with the agencies like fire and emergency services, police and other departments is crucial.

Goa has been receiving continuous rainfall since last fortnight.

Cuncolim village was flooded two weeks back while last week the low lying areas of Sankhalim and Bicholim had feared floods when the gates of dam located upstream were opened due to excess water in the reservoir.

Monday 29 July 2013

http://news.oneindia.in/2013/07/29/civilian-volunteers-goa-undergo-training-disaster-management-1270519.html

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Hidden Maryland: Office of the Chief Medical Examiner


Hearses enter the six-story building in West Baltimore through garage doors that snap open and shut quickly, to keep business discreet.

Researchers who work across from the $43 million, Forensic Medical Center catch glimpses of the drop-offs. They call the state-of-the-art center on the edge of the University of Maryland BioPark the Bat Cave.

The morgue — shrouded in myth, misrepresented on screen — typically is portrayed as a dark, dank basement with sexy forensic investigators peering into microscopes, eccentric doctors weighing body parts, and officials pulling open refrigerated drawers, unzipping body bags and asking spouses: “Is this your husband?”

In reality, the largest free-standing medical examiner’s office in the country is home to about 80 full-time employees, many of them pathologists, who work in an airy, bright, sterile but friendly atmosphere, where death is analyzed and documented in frank scientific detail. It’s here that the state learns the facts behind thousands of deaths each year.

“It’s not at all like it’s portrayed on TV,” spokesman Bruce Goldfarb said. “Our medical examiners don’t wear high heels and they are not running out into the field and chasing down people to interview.”

But while it might not look as if it came from central casting, this building to which few but police officers, paramedics and funeral directors have access is home to museum-quality artifacts, sideshow-worthy oddities — and touches of dry wit.

First, the facts: This summer, crime, accidents or suspcious circumstances are sending between 13 and 18 bodies each day to the sole medical examiner’s office for the entire state. The staff studies more than 8,000 bodies a year — and determines more than half to have succumbed to natural causes.

Homicide accounts for about 14 percent of deaths, suicide for 12 percent and accidents for 27 percent.

Chief Medical Examiner David R. Fowler oversees two deputies and 11 assistant medical examiners, as well as a toxicologists, epidemiologists and several forensic investigators.

The nearly three-year-old building in which they work was designed without a basement to help dispel stereotypes. The quick-closing garage doors were also a carefully considered detail.

The center is equipped with a CT scan machine, so examiners can study bodies without cutting, when religious sensitivities are an issue.

You’d find much of the same equipment in a hospital. Fowler describes the office’s work as a “physical exam, one day too late.”

The first floor of the building serves as a garage that can be transformed into a mass casualty center. A large classroom on the fourth floor, with banks of desks and communication connections, can become an emergency command center during chemical or biological disasters.

The building itself was built to accommodate state population projections for 2035.

Inside the entrance, the scene is unremarkable: O, The Oprah Magazine on a glass coffee table, a long row of U-shaped desks, the scent of a dentist’s office.

A few doors down comes the tour’s first twist.

Room 417, marked “Pathology Exhibit,” holds 18 dollhouses of death.

Enclosed in glass, intricate dioramas called “nutshells” recreate actual murder and death scenes from the 1930s and ’40s in painstaking detail. Frances Glessner Lee, the millionaire International Harvester heiress who advanced crime scene investigation techniques during the first half of the 20th century, created the miniatures to explore unexplained deaths, recreating scenes down to tiny burnt cigarettes on the ground.

Lee, who helped establish the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard — the nation’s first academic program in forensic pathology — donated the miniatures to the university. When Harvard planned to throw them away, longtime medical examiner Russell S. Fisher brought them to Baltimore.

Scenes portray a man and woman’s bloody bodies still in their bedclothes with blood spatter flecking the bedroom’s wallpapered wall. An inscription explains: “Robert Judson, a foreman in a shoe factory, his wife, Kate Judson, and their baby, Linda Mae Judson, were discovered dead by Paul Abbott, a neighbor.”

One model shows how a farmer named Eben Wallace was found hanging in a hay-filled barn. There’s a man shot to death in a log cabin, a charred body in a charred home, a body splattered face-down on the sidewalk outside a three-story apartment complex and the decomposing body of “Mrs. Rose Fishman,” found in a pink bathroom in 1942.

The models have been the subject of a documentary. Film director John Waters and musician David Byrne have viewed the exhibit, Goldfarb said. The office keeps them not only for historical purposes, but also to train detectives and forensic investigators on how to read crime scenes.

Doors away is a room called the “Scarpetta House,” donated by novelist Patricia Cornwell. Named after Kay Scarpetta, Cornwell’s medical examiner heroine, the space is decorated as a model house, with a swing set, siding and wooden deck “outside” and a furnished living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and laundry room “inside.” A trash can holds garbage; a box of Food Lion Confruity Crisp cereal sits on top of the fridge.

Using a bloody mannequin, investigators create death scene scenarios to solve.

One floor down are the rooms you would expect in a Medical Examiner’s Office: a neuropathology lab, a histology lab with microscope slides of thin organ samples, a room with rows of white liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry machines that measure compounds in blood.

The two main autopsy rooms, located on the second floor, are cavernous, with cutting boards, scales, sinks and bright lighting that does not allow any shadows.


Three floors up, among cubicles and offices for medical examiners, the main wall displays a gallery of black and white portraits — past pathologists in the Baltimore office.

Hiding in the middle of this Hall of Fame is a picture of “Dr. J. Quincy,” the medical examiner portrayed by Jack Klugman in the long-running television show.

At the other end of the floor is the office of forensic anthropologist William Rodriguez. A cracked skull and jawbone that he is working to identify stares out at visitors.

When he worked for the Department of Defense, Rodriguez investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the crash of space shuttle Columbia, the beheading in Pakistan of journalist Daniel Pearl and war crimes in Kosovo.

In 2009, he helped recover the remains of Capt. Michael Scott Speicher, a Navy pilot shot down during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In a cabinet above his desk, Rodriguez keeps a cast of Uday Hussein’s leg. The son of the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was killed in a firefight with U.S. forces in 2003. Rodriguez helped to identify his battered body by tracing a titanium rod in one of his legs.

Other items in Rodriguez’s office include travel photos and a notepad in the shape of a chalk-outlined body with a red blood spot in the middle.

A popular figure in the workplace, according to co-workers, Rodriguez brings in hot dogs for staff every Wednesday.

That’s a good thing, because there’s no cafeteria in the building.

“Not a very sit down enjoy-your-lunch kind of place,” said Anna Lichiello, a forensic investigator who joined the office in October.

Monday 29 July 2013

http://darkroom.baltimoresun.com/2013/07/hidden-maryland-office-of-the-chief-medical-examiner/#12

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Death toll rises in Italy coach crash: 'At least 36 dead' near Avellino


At least 36 people have been killed in southern Italy when a coach plunged 30m (98ft) down a steep slope, Italian media report citing rescue services.

The coach hit several cars before coming off a flyover near the town of Avellino, in the Campania region.

At least 11 people have been injured, some of them seriously, the Italian news agency Ansa reported.

The coach was taking about 50 people, including children, back to Naples following a pilgrimage, reports say.

The cause of the accident is not clear.

TV footage showed smashed vehicles on the flyover and shrouded bodies lined up by the side of a road.

The Italian news agency ANSA quoted its photographer, Cesare Abbate, as saying he saw 30 bodies covered by sheets near the bus after the crash.

Rescuers at the scene confirmed at least 24 people had been killed.

A spokesman for the fire service said rescue operations were continuing and that four young children were among 11 pulled alive from the stricken coach.

State radio quoted police as saying the driver was among the dead, and Italian TV quoted people at the scene as saying about 49 people were on the bus. The bus looked as if it had partially split open.

Motorists and their passengers whose vehicles were hit by the bus stood on the highway near their vehicles. One car's rear was completely crumpled, while another was smashed on its side.

"The situation is critical," leading fireman Pellegrino Iandolo told Italian television.

"Our men are working to save as many lives as possible."

A police spokesman told the French news agency AFP that the number of victims could not yet be confirmed.

"We are still pulling people from the vehicle. Our priority now is to free the wounded," he said.

He added that the Naples-Bari highway had been closed to traffic because of the accident.

Reports say the bus smashed through a guardrail on the flyover. It came to rest in heavy undergrowth, which is hampering the rescue operation.

The injured are being taken to hospitals in Avellino, Salerno and Nola, Ansa said.

Italian news reports said the bus could hold a little more than 50 passengers and that it was almost filled on the ride back after an excursion from the southeastern Puglia area.

This is popular with Catholic faithful who admire Padre Pio, a late mystic monk who was based there. Most of the passengers were from the Campania area around Naples, ANSA said.

A reporter for Naples daily Il Mattino, Giuseppe Crimaldi, told Sky TG24 TV from the scene that some witnesses told him the bus had been going at a 'normal' speed on the downhill stretch of the highway when it suddenly veered and started hitting cars.

He said some witnesses thought they heard a noise as if the bus had blown a tyre. A local prosecutor arrived at the crash scene to begin an investigation into the cause of the crash.

Monday 29 July 2013

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23486086

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2380560/Italy-coach-crash-At-30-people-die-children-pulled-alive-coach-plunges-100ft.html

http://news.sky.com/story/1121510/thirty-six-dead-in-italian-tour-bus-plunge

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