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Mar. 31st, 2009 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krazykitkatA tiny bit of good news in the Victorian bushfires, with the death toll being revised down by nearly 40.
THE death toll of the Black Saturday bushfires has been revised down from 210 to 173 after the coroner's office was finally able to classify the horrendously damaged human remains.
Some remains that police initially thought came from several victims were, in fact, of one person, while other remains in the initial count of 210 have now been identified as animal.
The drop in the number of victims illustrated the extreme nature of the fires and the difficult task faced by forensic investigators in locating and identifying human remains, police said. And they warned that some of those who died may never be identified.
"The DVI [disaster victim identification] process is a very difficult one - the damage that fire does to the human body is absolutely extreme," the deputy commissioner Kieran Walshe said. "The unfortunate thing is … because of the ferocity of the fires, we will get to a point that there will be remains that cannot be formally identified."
THE death toll of the Black Saturday bushfires has been revised down from 210 to 173 after the coroner's office was finally able to classify the horrendously damaged human remains.
Some remains that police initially thought came from several victims were, in fact, of one person, while other remains in the initial count of 210 have now been identified as animal.
The drop in the number of victims illustrated the extreme nature of the fires and the difficult task faced by forensic investigators in locating and identifying human remains, police said. And they warned that some of those who died may never be identified.
"The DVI [disaster victim identification] process is a very difficult one - the damage that fire does to the human body is absolutely extreme," the deputy commissioner Kieran Walshe said. "The unfortunate thing is … because of the ferocity of the fires, we will get to a point that there will be remains that cannot be formally identified."
