Now, the public can view a photographic record of how military pathologists identified virtually all the victims at two of the crash sites: the Pentagon, where 189 died, and a rural part of Pennsylvania, where 44 died in the thwarted hijacking. The identification of the nearly 3000 victims at the World Trade Center was dealt with by New York's local authorities.
At the centre of the identification process was the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the main government agency for postmortem identification of bodily remains recovered from new and old military events. Its efforts were challenged by the destructiveness of the crashes; for forensic specialists, little was left to work with at either site. Nonetheless, advanced preparations for disasters proved useful, perhaps indispensable, to identification efforts. After the crashes, on-site responses were promptly provided by the federal government's regional Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), a volunteer organisation of citizens and federal employees who provide forensic, mortuary, and family support services after disasters. The DMORT professional roster includes forensic pathologists, forensic anthropologists who specialise in osteology, and forensic odontologists. The crash sites were designated as federal crime scenes, so federal authorities could control access and supervise recovery of remains.
