Xeni Jardin:
Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites was in Southeast Asia on a break from reporting duties when the tsunami disaster took place. He’s now in Thailand, reporting — and back on the blog again, dispatching photos and first-person accounts. Snip:
One-hundred and fifty-nine pine coffins have been stacked in the garage — many of them big enough to hold refrigerators — built to accommodate the now bloated and rapidly decomposing bodies inside.
Thai soldiers, wearing surgical masks, race against time to arrest the process — before the bodies become impossible to identify.
In a well-choreographed drill — they use hammers to smash square blocks of dry ice, carrying the shards on sheets of plastic and dumping them inside the coffins with the remains. They work at a very high tempo — almost as if they were trying to rescue the living — rather than preserve the dead.
On the sides of the coffins are photographs of the deceased as they were found, special attention paid to jewelry or tattoos, anything that can help in identifying who they once were.
The pictures are grisly — bruised, blackened, bodies misshapen from the ferocious force of an angry ocean and all that travels with it. Old, young, small, large, South Africans, Australians, Canadians, English, Thais �- all victims of the earth’s unrest on a day when she seemed to have precious little mercy.
…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…