The task force on cadaver collection has requested the US government to send K-9 detection dogs to this city as authorities continued to struggle in retrieving the dead more than two months after the onslaught of typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan).
The request, which was endorsed by the Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, was sent to the US Embassy in Manila on Monday.
Sr. Supt. Pablito Cordeta, task force head and Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) regional director, said 11 more decomposing bodies were retrieved in Tacloban from Jan. 8 to 11, bringing the death toll in this city alone to 2,540.
The Eastern Visayas Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council has recorded 5,803 casualties as of Jan. 13 in the region. Some 1,729 remain missing. “Presently, we just depend on visuals in our retrieval operation. We badly need the expertise of sniffing dogs especially that they are the same teams that responded to the World Trade Center bombing in the US,” Mr. Cordeta said.
Humanitarian workers from Holland, South Korea and New York had brought trained dogs with them, but they all left Tacloban on Nov. 30.
“With the help of sniffing dogs, we’re able to recover about a thousand bodies in a week. The cadaver collection has slowed down when they left. We are hoping the US government will favorably respond to our request,” Mr. Cordeta added.
The team has been focusing their retrieval operation in the coastal villages of the city, where debris from the Nov. 8 typhoon is still being cleared. After a body is retrieved, the Philippine National Police (PNP) Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO) examines it for documentation before transporting it to a mass grave site in Suhi village, where it is examined by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). The task force is composed of 20 members from the BFP and PNP.
Tuesday 14 January 2014
http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=Nation&title=Sniffer-dogs-sought-to-find-bodies-in-Tacloban-City&id=81985
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