Coroners support recovery in Butte County

In response to Butte County’s authorities’ request for mutual aid, Deputy Coroner Hastin Stein traveled to Butte County for a three-day deployment starting Nov. 11. Working with a team comprised of anthropologists, personnel from other coroner’s offices and sheriff’s deputies, Stein visited what was left of homes where residents reported as missing lived.

With more than six years of experience at the Coroner’s Office, Stein worked at the scene of the 2013 crash of an Asiana airplane at San Francisco International Airport as well as homes damaged by structure fires. But in sifting through the wreckage left after the fire ravaged the town of Magalia just north of Paradise, where the fire originated, Stein was struck by how little was left for the teams to search and how widespread the destruction was.

“This was very different from anything that we would typically experience,” he said.

Compared to the aftermath of deadly house fires, very little of the homes and structures in the Camp Fire’s path remained, obscuring where human remains might be located, said Stein. Because anthropologists have more specialized training in distinguishing human bones from those of animals or other materials such as dry wall or plastic, he said they would typically start off a search looking for anything that might be a bone. Once they identified a human bone, coroner’s staff would recover and document all the remains they could find.

Stein said he worked with staff from Butte, Sacramento, Fresno, Alameda and Marin counties while he was there, and said he was impressed with how well the coordinated effort was managed between different agencies, such as Cal Fire and members of various district attorney’s offices, coroner’s offices and law enforcement agencies.

“Everybody was sending whatever resources they could to try to help out,” he said. “We all worked together to make sure everything was done as efficiently as possible.”

San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault said the decision to send resources to an allied agency was not a difficult one. He explained the call from Butte County for mutual aid initially went out to Region III, which includes the northeastern part of the state. But once the wildfire spread even further, the call extended into Region II, which includes San Mateo County and much of the Northern California coast through Monterey.

Since he started at the Coroner’s Office in 1992, Foucrault said this was the first request his office has received for mutual aid. But the incident did call to mind the 2010 explosion of a PG&E natural gas pipeline that killed eight people in San Bruno, a disaster that caused Foucrault to poll Region II to see what mutual aid assets might be available for the recovery. He said no resources from other county were ultimately used in the 2010 disaster once it became clear the death toll was not as high as officials initially feared it would be.

But the incident serves a reminder for staff of his office that the county could be in a similar predicament someday and should always be ready to help in the event of a disaster, near or far.

“We want to make sure that family members find their loved ones,” he said. “Whether it’s local or out of the county, we’re always prepared to help.”

Having been deployed to Butte County Nov. 17 for three days, Deputy Coroner Elizabeth Ortiz said it was the desire to locate missing people and bring closure to families in the community that drove staff working on recovery teams. She said teams comprised of two deputy coroners, two anthropologists and a Butte County sheriff’s deputy assembled in the mornings and were dispatched to areas where officials believed human remains might be found.

Ortiz said depending on the level of destruction at a given residence, where to look for remains may not be as obvious as other scenes she’s worked on, noting everything in the area had been subject to high heat, winds and falling ash. Though she acknowledged whether cars were in the driveway of a given residence could be an indication of whether its occupant was able to escape the home, Ortiz said there were few signs pointing recovery teams in the direction of where to look.

Having worked at the Coroner’s Office for more than five years, Ortiz her experience with a wide array of scenes in the county as well as training for disaster preparedness came into play as she worked in Butte County.

“We don’t always have all the answers for every case,” she said. “We have to try and piece things together just like we would any other case and work with what we have and go from there.”

Though Ortiz noted San Mateo County agencies have taken several steps to ensure they are prepared for future emergencies, she said her deployment impressed upon her the importance of such training. She said she was also struck by the willingness of so many agencies — including one from Oregon — to support staff in the region and work together to tackle a large-scale recovery effort. And though she acknowledged the tragic circumstances of the effort, she believed the experience could inform her work in the county.

“This will be something that we can use as far as ‘how we would proceed and maybe ask questions and better prepare ourselves and make sure we have all our ducks in a row as best as we can for anything that happens here?’” she said. “ I think in that sense, it was a great experience.”

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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