After slow start, $5M Offutt lab is now bustling in effort to ID remains of Pearl Harbor victims

[Omaha Steve]

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U.S. NAVY
Members of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency place an American flag over a casket containing the remains of an unknown USS Oklahoma service member in Honolulu in July 2015. The DPAA has been sending USS Oklahoma remains to Offutt's forensics lab for identification.


http://www.omaha.com/news/military/after-slow-start-m-offutt-lab-is-now-bustling-in/article_932c36a6-0bf6-5eee-81bf-d6c58146f2d0.html

POSTED: MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 2016 12:15 AM | UPDATED: 3:36 PM, MON JAN 25, 2016.
By Steve Liewer / World-Herald staff writer

For two years after a gala grand opening in June 2013, the tables in the new $5 million forensic lab at Offutt Air Force Base lay mostly bare and empty.

Intended to give the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command a lot more space to study the bones of unidentified soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, the sprawling new lab remained underused.

That has changed. Nearly all of the laboratory’s 56 tables now are filled with thousands of human bones, tagged and neatly laid out for future identification.

And following a forced reorganization of its parent command — now called the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency — the Offutt lab has a new director, several new forensic anthropologists and a new mission identifying World War II remains from Pearl Harbor and the European theater.

FULL story at link.