'Hurst's Dirkmaat among Haiti-bound search & rescue teams
The head of applied forensic sciences at Mercyhurst College, Dennis Dirkmaat, Ph.D., is among two disaster reflief teams deployed to Haiti by Kenyon International Emergency Services, an international disaster management company.
One team will be working in Port-au-Prince to remove human remains from the devastated landscape; Dirkmaat will be working with the other group at the morgue in the Dominican Republic to process remains and get them repatriated back to their families. They will also collect medical records and missing persons' information.
This is not the first time Dirkmaat has provided his expertise in forensic investigation to Kenyon International, on multiple occasions serving as a consultant on airline crash recoveries and victim identification projects in Kenya and Angola. Besides his affiliation with Kenyon, Dirkmaat is also a member of the national Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, through which he most recently worked on the forensic investigation of Hurricane Katrina.
WJET-TV video (Courtesy of WJET-TV)