Dr. Joyce deJong was interested in mass fatality management, but admits she had “zero experience” with the specialty when she first volunteered to be on-call and at the ready as a member of the federal government’s Region 5 Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team.
Now, more than 20 years later, she has amassed a vast amount of experience from 11 deployments with DMORT – most recently to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria – and is known nationally as a subject matter expert on mass fatality management.
“When something like a mass fatality incident happens, we have an opportunity to provide a service, to give back,” said Dr. deJong, chair of the Department of Pathology at WMed. “It was probably never more apparent than with 9/11. When that happened, everyone wanted to do something. As a member of this team, I was in a role where I not only said I wanted to help, but I had a skill set that put me in a position that I could do just that.”
The DMORT teams fall under the purview of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and, typically, each team is made up of 40 to 50 people whose mission, primarily, is to identify victims in the wake of a mass fatality incident in the U.S. or U.S. territories through the use of DNA, dental records, fingerprints and X-rays, among other methods.
Dr. deJong’s first deployment as a member of DMORT was in 1997 following a Korean Airlines crash in Guam. One day after the 9/11 attacks, she was deployed to New York City and then to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the site of the crash of United Airlines Flight 93.
In 2005, she was deployed to Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast and, more recently, in 2010, she was deployed to Haiti after a massive earthquake struck the country. She was also in Joplin, Missouri, in 2011, following a tornado that killed more than 150 people.
“What we give is answers,” Dr. deJong said.
Dr. deJong’s deployment to Puerto Rico in September was her first with DMORT since the Joplin tornado. She was part of a six-member assessment team who flew into the San Juan airport just two days after the hurricane swept across the island on September 20.
“It was heartbreaking to see how lives of the residents were severely disrupted, not to mention the damage to the vegetation and so many of the buildings,” Dr. deJong said.
Dr. deJong said the team was charged with assessment and determining what assistance the medical examiner’s office in Puerto Rico needed following the hurricane. More than 30 people died as a result of the storm and Dr. deJong said her team, once it arrived in Puerto Rico, turned its attention to helping the office there handle its regular load of cases as the island has a death rate of about 80 residents per day not including the storm-related deaths.
“Some of it was just going out and talking with the funeral home directors, assessing their needs and reporting on their needs,” Dr. deJong said. “We were helping coordinate efforts and helping local authorities figure out what to do with the resources they had coming in.”
Dr. deJong said she spent a little less than two weeks in Puerto Rico with DMORT. Despite the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria, she said there were signs that things were improving before she returned to the U.S.
“Every day, you would see things getting better,” she said. “We saw the wildlife starting to come back.”
Dr. deJong said she values her work with DMORT, especially being able to help and provide her talents in the aftermath of tragedies in different communities.
She said her DMORT deployments are also valuable because she is able to take what she learns while she’s away and improve the work she does at – and outside of – the medical school. In addition to being the chair of the Department of Pathology at WMed, Dr. deJong is the Chief Medical Examiner for nine counties – Kalamazoo, Allegan, Calhoun, Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Mason, Muskegon, St. Joseph and Van Buren – in Michigan.
“Every single time I deploy I come back with additional knowledge and I revise our mass fatality plan … and I feel better prepared to handle our own counties,” Dr. deJong said.