The task of finding the missing
The desperate battle to halt the flames raging through Wine Country last month overshadowed a remarkable, multiagency effort to locate thousands of people whose missing- persons status amid mass evacuations provoked fear that an already catastrophic death toll might surge into the hundreds.
At the height of the fires that ignited Oct. 8 and destroyed nearly 9,000 structures in Northern California, roughly 2,500 people couldn’t be reached by friends, family members or co- workers.
Finding so many missing people — and pinpointing the 43 who died — became a complicated project that yielded either relief or heartbreak but had rarely been attempted on such a scale.
As detectives whittled lists, the lists only grew. In Sonoma County, where the Tubbs Fire flattened whole neighborhoods on the north
edge of Santa Rosa, the Sheriff’s Office took as many as 200 missing- persons reports a day, more than 2,200 in total.
The hotline that was created has been closed, but the agency is still getting as many as five reports a day — most of which are quickly resolved, with positive results.
“The majority were found by good old- fashioned police work,” said Sgt. Spencer Crum, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department. “Everyone had fled really fast, within a couple of hours, and didn’t have a chance to call Cindy, their cousin in Alabama. They were staying in cars, shelters and with friends, and a lot of them didn’t bring their cell phone chargers or couldn’t find service. It was pretty chaotic.”
Although many of the missing eventually checked in, a vast number were located by the county detectives who worked through missing- persons forms filled out by another 10 employees who manned the emergency operations center hotline.
Lt. Tim Duke, head of the investigations bureau, said his crew searched records, made phone calls and picked through rubble in an effort to resolve the outstanding cases.
“We used social media information, law enforcement networking, prior contacts, anything we could use to get information about this person,” Duke said. “If we didn’t get a contact, they rose on our probability chart.”
The reports, entered into a computer spreadsheet by three department interns, were prioritized based on factors such as whether the missing person lived in a known burn area, how old they were and whether they had medical issues.
Some 250 search- and- rescue workers and members of the National Guard searched destroyed subdivisions, but Duke said it was impossible to look for bodies in every home associated with the missing list.
“We would try to locate people within our office first, primarily through phone calls, search engines and social media to see if they had posted something,” Duke said.
The detectives would contact relatives of the high- priority cases and ask them about the layout of a home or how many cars the missing person owned. An assessment team of two to four people would then visit the home to do a cursory check.
“If they owned two vehicles, and both vehicles are there, that’s not good, but if one car was missing, that was better, and we would lower them on the probability chart,” Duke said. “If it remained high probability, an investigative team, including a search- and- rescue component, a K- 9 unit and one violent crimes investigator, would go out and look for anything that would remove it from the high- probability list.”
Duke said almost 90 percent of the people on the high- probability list were later found dead. In some cases, he said, intact bodies were discovered, but most of those killed were buried under 2- foot- tall piles of charred rubble and ash.
Cadaver dogs were necessary in many cases and, Duke said, the coroner would be called whenever remains were detected. Often, odontologists were needed to identify teeth or dental work, and anthropologists had to be called in as well to determine whether pieces of bone were human.
“The fire was so intense, a lot of the remains were cremated, so we were looking for parts or pieces of bodies,” he said. “If there was a hell, that is what some of these devastated areas looked like.”
In several cases, Duke said, bodies had to be identified by the serial numbers on hip, shoulder or knee replacements. Bone marrow had to be extracted in other cases so the DNA could be compared with that of potential family members.
“At one residence we had to go back three times before we located the remains of somebody,” Duke said. “We found the person by using the hypothesis that people will often run to wet areas such as pools, bathtubs or showers to seek shelter from fire. We located the body in a bathroom area.”
Finding remains always yielded another terrible assignment — the notification. And too often, Duke said, detectives were forced to notify hospital patients who had barely escaped with their lives that a loved one had not made it. He said he is haunted by thoughts of the people who were overcome by flames as they attempted to escape.
“For me, the hardest part was finding someone in a vehicle who was trying to get away and didn’t make it,” he said. “Power lines had gone down, trees had fallen. At some point people were unable to get out because the roads were blocked.”
For every tragedy, he said, there were several heartening reunions in which missing relatives thought to be dead suddenly reappeared or were found by investigators.
“I heard a particular story from a deputy that there was a car that drove past him that was literally on fire,” he said. “He was able to get that person to pull over and he got him out of the fire.”
Capt. Steve Blower of the Napa County Sheriff’s Office said 200 people were reported missing to that agency during the Atlas Fire, which destroyed 445 homes in Napa and Solano counties and killed six people.
The vast majority were quickly found, he said, including one family that happened to be on vacation in France. The dead included two elderly couples living near the Silverado Resort and Spa.
Duke said the tedious work of going through so many missingpersons reports showed, in the end, how well first responders had performed as the flames moved in.
“The first responders were going door to door with bullhorns, driving up and down streets with lights on and sirens, and I believe that reduced the amount of fatalities we had astronomically,” he said. “It was certainly a high fatality count, but the potential was for much higher.”