Spare a thought for the Recovery Team- [View all]

[malaise]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/28/germanwings-rescue-worker-interview-recovery-49525
<snip>
Germanwings crash: ‘the overriding feeling is one of injustice,’ says officer with grim task of retrieving the dead
Colonel Patrick Touron of the team recovering the remains of Germanwings 4U9525 says the work is physically exhausting, perilous and psychologically draining

It was, even by the standards of criminal research, a gruesome job.

The flecks of white on the ground that the first helicopter search-and-rescue teams had seen were not patches of melting snow, as first thought, but debris from the aircraft mingled with human remains.

Once investigators understood that the biggest piece of wreckage was barely the size of a family car, there was a collective realisation that the stretchers would not be necessary. “We do not have a single intact body,” Touron, deputy director of the National Gendarmerie Criminal Research Institute, told the Observer.

“If you see the wreckage, it’s no surprise that we have not found [whole] bodies, but parts of bodies. We have, at this exact moment in time, about 1,500 body parts.”