Dental Identification of the Victims of the Cold Storage Warehouse Fire in Icheon.

Lee, Sang Seob; Kim, Dal Won; Yoon, Seung Hyun; Park, Ju Hyun

Case Report

Korean Journal of Legal Medicine 2009;33(1):74-78.
Published online May 31, 2009.

Dental Identification of the Victims of the Cold Storage Warehouse Fire in Icheon.

Sang Seob Lee, Dal Won Kim, Seung Hyun Yoon, Ju Hyun Park

¹Division of Forensic Medicine, National Institute of Scientific Investigation, Seoul, Korea. komiyama@korea.kr
²Department of Oral Medicine, College of Dentistry, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea.

Abstract

The fire broke out in the cold storage warehouse in Icheon, Gyeonggi-do, Korea on January 7th, 2008 and forty workers were died from the fire. Dental identification was carried out to the 25 victims among the 40 ones. The five remains were identified through dental approaches. The public ignorance about the importance of forensic odontology and the difficulty procuring antemortem dental records from the families of the victims were kind of hardships to use the victim's previous dental information. The availability of antemortem data was 12.5%. The public realization about the importance of dental identification and building-up an appropriate co-work system between relevant organizations are required to collect antemortem data more efficiently without wasting time.

Key Words: fire, dental identification, antemortem data, co-work system