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If anything, it seems out of place. But then, it’s hard to think of a place where a 37-acre morgue complex would fit in. Nestled among levee-side cow pastures, residential hamlets and a nondescript stone yard in Carville are two Quonset hut-shaped structures where the dead go to find their identity.

A lone dirt road marks the entrance to the Disaster Mortuary Operation Recovery Team facility, where a high chain-link fence and a number of security guards seal it off from the otherwise peaceful community. Only 35 minutes from downtown Baton Rouge DMORT is specifically designed to identify hundreds of bodies at a time, the only one of its kind in the country.

As the 2007 hurricane season reaches its climatological peak, the DMORT complex, built shortly after Hurricane Katrina, stands ready to confront the most tragic aspect of any catastrophe, whether it is a natural disaster or an act of terrorism: identifying victims and locating their families.

If a catastrophe occurred in the southern U.S. and killed a large number of people over a short period of time, the facility, while grim by nature, could prove to be an important asset to the Gulf Coast region. And if the Department of Homeland Security is willing to undergo a shift in how massive casualty situations are handled, some believe the Carville DMORT facility could become a major economic boon to the state as well.

“Having a facility like this one situated just outside of Baton Rouge, well, it could be a very valuable national asset. It’s got everything,” says Chuck Smith, deputy commander of DMORT Region 6, which includes Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers set up a makeshift morgue in St. Gabriel that operated under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, specifically the DMORT program. The program is designed to provide mortuary assistance in the case of mass fatality incidents. DMORT workers include professionals from across the country, including doctors, morticians, dentists, forensic scientists and anthropologists.

Workers at the St. Gabriel facility soon found it was less than ideal for a number of reasons, and the Corps, in cooperation with the U.S. Navy, began working to find a facility better equipped to handle the dozens of bodies arriving daily.

“It was so hot, and the building had no insulation. We literally had people passing out on the morgue line, and the heat did nothing to help preserve the bodies,” says Mike Smith, director of the Louisiana Field Office for the Corps. Mike Smith and Chuck Smith are not related.

The St. Gabriel location also lacked places for the several hundred DMORT workers to stay. Identifying the roughly 1,500 people killed during Katrina was a time-consuming process. Workers needed a facility where they could eat, sleep and get away from the tragedy of their work for a few hours.

Area hotels quickly filled up with evacuees from New Orleans and coastal parishes, so finding places for the volunteers to look after themselves became increasingly difficult. Housing for the workers was an immediate priority. When Corps workers weren’t able to find a location that met all of their needs, building one that did became the logical answer.

Thus the DMORT complex began to take shape. Taking just shy of three months to build, the $17 million facility stretches over 37 acres and includes an 18,720-square-foot morgue facility capable of processing and identifying up to 10,000 victims, 150 per day. Six dormitories capable of housing 300 volunteers line one side of the complex, and an additional 186 people can sleep in the second 52,000-square-foot structure. The complex also has a fully functioning kitchen, dining room, recreational and warehouse facilities. In short, it has everything volunteers could need during a catastrophe.

“The assumption was when we put the facility together was that the volunteers would be too busy and wouldn’t have access to the outside world,” Mike Smith says.

The most bizarre aspect of the complex, though, is the two largest structures are made of fabric, a seemingly odd choice for a facility within striking distance of future hurricanes. Mike Smith says the fabric structures are quite capable of dealing with a storm should one affect the facility.

“We are using the same type of structures in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he says. “They can handle winds up to 130 miles per hour.”

The complex’s amenities are impressive, rivaled only by the military’s mortuary facility in Dover, Del. But Chuck Smith says the most attractive aspect of the facility isn’t necessarily what it is but what it could be. The facility ceased official operations in March 2006 and now opens for training exercises for DMORT workers from time to time. If it could become a facility used on a more consistent basis, Chuck Smith says it could bring permanent jobs to the area. That would take a mental shift in gears on the part of Homeland Security.

“Whenever we work an incident, we run into the same set of problems, namely having to set up a morgue facility,” he says. “If we switched our thinking, and instead of bringing our people to the site of an incident, we brought the victims to another facility, we could avoid all of those problems. And this would be that facility.”

Simple as it may sound, convincing a government agency to divert from the status quo is no easy task. When confronting a disaster, law enforcement offices and federal agencies are hesitant to move victims out of their jurisdiction, fearing any number of mishaps could occur during transport.

Because of these concerns, what is more likely to happen is the facility could be used a year-round training of disaster medicine workers. Even that effort has become a “harder sell” because DMORT recently moved from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) control to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, bringing with it bureaucratic growing pains Chuck Smith says.

“If we could get over that hurdle, I could see this place being used as a training facility 12 months a year,” he says. “It would create a great deal of name recognition that would bring permanent jobs and even research opportunities in forensic science to the area.”

“It has almost anything related to disaster response FEMA or its contractors may need,” FEMA spokesman Andrew F. Thomas says.

The complex is prepared to handle the worst if a disaster should hit anywhere in the region. Until it becomes the training facility Chuck Smith says it could be, it will continue to stand ready to offer its assistance when called upon, just in case.