A specialist police taskforce is preparing for a year of work identifying those who perished in Victoria's bushfire disaster and understanding how they died.
Assistant Commissioner Dannye Moloney, a veteran of the Ash Wednesday fires, will head Phoenix, a 100-strong taskforce charged with victim identification and investigating the causes of the fires that have claimed so many lives.
Taskforce detectives will sit with families and friends of each victim to piece together a jigsaw from the chaos of the weekend's infernos.
Mr Moloney said arson squad experts and detectives with local knowledge would prepare coronial reports on each person who died.
''As you can appreciate now with the toll at 173 this is an enormous task, a very protracted and complex investigation that we are about to undertake for, I would suggest, a minimum of six months and up to 12 months into the future,'' he said.
''As a team across this state with all the other government agencies we hope to identify all the victims, establish how they died, and produce inquest briefs on every individual deceased for the information of the coroner to determine cause of death.''
Phoenix will focus its attention on five major fires in Bendigo, Kilmore-Wandong, Churchill, Marysville-Narbethong and Beechworth, and each fire will be given attention.
The immediate concern is to identify bodies, a task the fires' ferocity has complicated. Police are working in dangerous conditions and cannot assume that bodies found in buildings or cars are those of the owners.
''As we speak in the environment there are many police and other support, army and so forth, searching locations for deceased persons,'' Mr Moloney said. ''Now the disaster victim identification crews are the most important crews in regard to the initial response of the investigation.
''It is important we allow them to do their job thoroughly, to get all the evidence from the sites of these deaths and feed that to the investigators. You can imagine the consequences for the community, let alone the families and the friends of these deceased persons, that if we do not do this thoroughly and we operate on evidence ... we are going to cause great heartache if we make a mistake.''
Disaster victim identification specialists from across Australia, including 16 from the ACT, will examine bodies for distinctive scars, tattoos and gather evidence to confirm identities.
The next job for detectives is to notify next of kin. ''I can assure all of those connected to the deceased, as soon as we possibly can, once we know the facts, you will be contacted by our taskforce,'' Mr Moloney said.
''At that stage it's very important that we get counselling for those people and ongoing support. But as importantly, it is very important that our investigators then speak with the family and friends and next of kin to put the pieces of the jigsaw together in relation to their movements.''
Mr Moloney, who was in Dandenong during the Ash Wednesday fires, said former arson squad members were lining up to volunteer for the investigation and the best would be selected.State Coroner Jennifer Coate said the scientific and legal challenges were enormous and complex.
The number of bodies was not Justice Coate's main concern. She said each person would be treated respectfully and given the utmost care.
The most challenging aspect of the investigation would be the destructive nature of fire.
''It's the effects of fire and the impact that has on the identification that's the enormity of the task,'' she said.
''We haven't had to face this task before in Victoria, but we feel that we have the resources that we need to get through the processes that we must go through to ensure we give the best possible answers we can to those members of the community who seek those answers.''
Email a friend