Dr. Charles Hirsch, chief medical examiner, City of New York: We were ready to start receiving the dead on 9/11. It went pretty much as we had planned. The only major difference from the standpoint of our agency is that in spite of all the planning, we had never conceived of a situation in which hundreds or thousands of people would be fragmented. We had no specific contingency plan for a mass disaster in which DNA would be the major source of identification.
