By Graeme Strachan

TENS OF thousands of families will never know for sure what happened to their relatives in the aftermath of the tsunami disaster, according to a forensic expert at Dundee University.

Speaking last night for the first time since returning from Thailand, Professor Sue Black said tens of thousands of people killed in the tsunami would probably never be identified.

Professor Black also warned that locals, who were not directly affected, would suffer for a very long time because of the impact of the disaster on the country’s tourism industry.

An internationally renowned expert, Professor Black flew to Phuket on Hogmanay where a significant number of bodies have been retained in refrigerated trucks to preserve them for identification

“The enormity of the task is that there are tens of thousands of people who will probably never be identified and that makes it a very, very sad situation,” she said.

“The trouble is, from my point of view we’re looking at our role as being in assisting the identification of the deceased to allow those remains to be repatriated to the families.

“But these are unfortunately not the only victims in this disaster, although the deceased and their families are a prime concern.

“The hotel we stayed in had a 95% cancellation rate. People, of course, aren’t coming here on holiday and as a result the local people are going to suffer from this for a very long time. They will lose jobs. They will have difficulty in terms of supporting their own families.

“So there are other financial ramifications in which the country is going to need assistance, not just those who have been deprived of their families, their homes, their livelihood as well, even for those who didn’t suffer directly from the disaster. It will take a long time for that scar to really be healed.

“They are tremendously welcoming and really, they are forward-thinking people in Thailand, and they will get over this, but I think what they need more than anything is help to ease the long-term financial burden.”

One-third of foreign tourists arriving in Thailand visit resorts in the affected provinces.

Professor Black’s work included a range of forensic disciplines, including anthropology, odontology, fingerprinting and DNA testing to enable bodies to be identified and returned to their families.

Professor Black, head of the anatomy and forensic anthropology department, was approached by Houston-based organisation Kenyon International Emergency Services to make up a team of experts from America, Australia, Britain and Singapore.

Her work has taken her to investigate the sites of butchery and genocide in Iraq, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, but she said the situation in Thailand was something she had never experienced before.

“The mass scale of it was mind-blowing,” she said.

“The devastation was unbelievable.

“I have worked in war crime situations before, but to be faced with a natural disaster on such a huge scale was unique, and something I hope I’m never faced with again.

“It was surreal in some respects. We stayed in a beautiful holiday resort untouched by the tsunami.

“We would leave in the morning and drive a mile up the road into a wasteland of rubble.

“It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever had to encounter.

“One day we were driving along the road and there was a boat perched on the fourth floor of a building and beside it was a ramshackle little hut that was untouched—it was very odd.”

Professor Black said the spirit and mentality of the team of experts kept her going.

“If you dwell too much on the enormity of the task and the sadness of the task then we wouldn’t be able to achieve what we can achieve,” she said.