To date, only one quarter of the 70,000 Sichuan Earthquake victims have been identified:
Soldiers took photographs and hair and blood samples before burying victims in mass graves in the hope that DNA testing might identify bodies in the future.
But given the devastation wrought by the earthquake, some bodies may never be recovered. In some cases, there may be few relatives left to identify victims.
19,065 bodies have been identified as students; because many bodies still have not been identified, the student death count is actually higher.
The government has been very busy building housing in the quake-ravaged zones but, as winter approaches, many survivors are still living in tents:
…almost 200,000 homes had been rebuilt and 685,000 homes were under reconstruction. But another 1.94m households still needed to be rebuilt or repaired and sites were still being selected for 25 townships which needed to be relocated.
For more on the Sichuan Earthquake, see CDT past posts.
