Washington Post
Dec 28 2004
The Countless, Unforgettable Victims Of Disaster
By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
The dead are never as quiet as they seem.
More than 20,000 people died in a matter of hours in half a dozen
countries in South Asia in one of the most catastrophic tsunamis of
recent times, and the death toll is only going to climb. Although the
world quickly forgets such natural disasters — the body count in
Bam, Iran, was 30,000 and it was just last year; hadn’t forgotten,
had you? — the memory of the dead always lingers for those who meet
them.
Ten years ago, an American relief worker named Rich Moseanko found
himself in eastern Africa during a humanitarian crisis. That wasn’t
odd. Moseanko has spent the better part of two decades working in
areas most people are desperate to leave.
What was unforgettable was that when he got out of his organization’s
truck near the city of Goma in eastern Zaire (since renamed Congo),
he stepped into a Rwandan refugee tide of nearly a million people.
The dead, felled by cholera and other diseases, were lying along the
roadside by the score. Within days, more than 1,500 people would be
dying every day. More than 25,000 are thought to have died in all,
though no one really knows.
You know what Moseanko’s most difficult job was?
Finding enough trucks to haul away the corpses.
“Going to bed every night with the smell of death in your nostrils,
walking around all day with it, you just don’t forget that,” says
Moseanko, the Los Angeles-based director of disaster relief for the
nonprofit group World Vision. “The soil around Goma was volcanic
rock, which meant there was nowhere to bury the bodies. We finally
convinced the French [soldiers] to dynamite some holes for mass
graves. I don’t know that anybody was even keeping track. It went on
for weeks.”
Mass death isn’t hard-wired in the brain as something that it is
supposed to see, like thunderstorms or rain showers. People are
supposed to die alone, perhaps in ones and twos, and those are the
deaths that are personally meaningful. Human scale is intact.
But the exposure to huge numbers of the recently and unnaturally dead
is not a category that the brain keeps on file. The image — or the
smell; anybody who has worked around large numbers of the dead will
tell you it’s the smell that’s the most disturbing — entwines itself
in the long whipcord of memory, and there it remains, never to leave.
“Anyone who tells you that it doesn’t affect you when it’s all over
just isn’t being truthful,” says Dewey Perks, chief of Fairfax
County’s Urban Search & Rescue Department, which has been sent by the
federal government to work in some of the worst disaster zones in the
world. Perks has worked earthquakes in Armenia, Turkey and Iran that
killed tens of thousands, whose corpses were dropped in mass graves
to prevent disease.
The mind does try, though. Aid workers, journalists and soldiers who
have worked around mass death and misery will tell you the only way
to keep working is to personally block out what one’s eyes are seeing
and focus on tasks at hand. It’s a key tool of survival, and it isn’t
new.
To cite but one relevant example from the scrapbook of history: On
Aug. 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatoa erupted off the coast of Java —
not far from the current disaster — setting off a series of
tsunamis. More than 36,000 people died.
A single sheet of water destroyed the entire town of Telok Betong in
seconds. As recounted in Simon Winchester’s recent bestseller
“Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded,” an engineer named R.A. van
Sandick, sitting on a steamer in the bay, had a front-row seat to the
wall of water. He still couldn’t tell friends what he saw.
“The tremendous dimensions of the destruction, in front of one’s
eyes, make it difficult to describe,” he wrote, as if being an
eyewitness were a hindrance to an accurate description of the event.
The best comparison, he judged, was the wave of a magic wand “on a
colossal scale and with the conscious knowledge that thousands of
people have perished in an indivisible moment.”