PORT ALLEN - As more names of the victims of the attack in New Orleans have come in, WBRZ spoke with a disaster response commander about what goes into identifying victims after a mass casualty incident.

WBRZ spoke with Chuck Smith, the commander of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT)—Region six. Region six includes Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Texas.

"The way the system works is if a mass fatality incident occurs, it could be terrorism, could be a plane crash. If the state or the local jurisdiction feels like they're overwhelmed, with the number of fatalities that have occurred, they can ask for federal assistance. The federal assistance that comes out is a DMORT team," Smith said.

Mass casualty incidents include terrorist attacks, plane crashes, and natural disasters among others. When an incident has occurred, DMORT will send out an assessment team to meet with local authorities to determine what they will need.

"If a deployment occurs from there, then we start notifying people, putting people on standby and traveling them in. We've got logistics people that will begin handling hotel arrangements," Smith said.

The response teams will use forensic testing, which could include DNA testing or analysis of fingerprints or dental records to ensure that each person killed is properly identified.

"We've got an operational team that is either working at the site of the disaster, at the medical examiner's office assisting with the operations there, and then there's an entirely separate team, now called a victim identification team," Smith said.

The victim team will set up a phone number for people who think their loved ones may be among the dead. The team works with the family to get dental records, fingerprints, or DNA swabs for comparison.

Response team members will have a variety of specialties.

"I can have everything from death investigators to funeral directors, to forensic dentists to forensic pathologists, x-ray techs," Smith said.

Smith has worked on DMORT operations for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11th terrorist attacks in 2001, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Smith says the scenes are very emotional.

"In the Oklahoma City bombing, there were 19 kids that were in the daycare center who were killed. From an emotional standpoint, everybody who had to work in that medical examiner's office in the identification of those kids, that was emotionally, very difficult," Smith said.

Smith said that when he heard about the New Orleans attack, he alerted DMORT leadership in Washington that he was monitoring what was happening. In this case, local authorities have not asked for help.