D10 had her eyes half-open. D09 wore a striped sweater, his face locked in a grimace. D06 and D05 had curly hair and wore pink sweatshirts–they looked like sisters. D08 had a stream of black hair fanned out below her, as if she were underwater.
D01 was tiny, with bangs and a polka-dotted shirt. Out of all the faces of the dead posted on a board at Preah Ket Mealea Hospital yesterday morning, she was the only one who had been identified by name: Chhan Chhorlida.
Her brother Chhan Kimly hovered over a railing near the photos, keeping a close watch over his sister’s frozen face. “That’s my younger sibling,” he repeated several times. “I’m her older brother.”
Nearby, Phan Tun pushed her way to the front of the crowd to look at the photograph board. She saw what she had been dreading.
“Dead, dead, they’re all dead!” she shrieked into a mobile telephone, convulsed in tears.
After a night filled with sirens, terror and uncertainty, hundreds of families embarked yesterday morning on a grim march around Phnom Penh’s hospitals, scrutinizing corpses and snapshots of corpses for the faces of their children.
Injured survivors described scenes of mayhem at the bridge. They talked of a mob packed so tight it was as if people’s limbs were locked together, of lying crushed beneath piles of bodies for more than four hours before rescue came.
The mood was somber even for those who had no relatives dead or missing, with crowds gathering to mourn near the site that city residents have begun to call the Bridge of Ghosts.
Phan Tun, who recognized her 21-year-old niece Pom Se in a photograph, said that the young woman was a garment worker who had gone to Koh Pich with a cousin.
“I thought they were enjoying it and excited to see the new bridge and the beautiful centers in Koh Pich City,” she said through tears. “They should not have died. They are young. It is the first and the most terrible and massive amount of death I’ve ever seen before.”
Behind her, a line of people filed silently into the hospital’s makeshift morgue to look for their dead. Just inside, two barefoot corpses lay on the floor, a bunch of bananas and a bundle of smoldering incense at their feet.
“Aie, she’s so pale, so beautiful!” one woman exclaimed.
Eight other bodies lay in another room, a heap of empty bottles of formaldehyde on the floor. Chheang Nhil, a medic, was injecting the preservative into each corpse so they wouldn’t decompose in the heat, and stuffing their mouths and noses with wads of cotton–to stop the spread of disease, he explained. He said that although he had worked as a military medic, he was staggered by yesterday’s carnage.
Similar scenes unfolded at two of the other eight Phnom Penh hospitals that were accepting victims of Monday night’s stampede.
At Calmette Hospital, desperate family members peered through flaps in a tent set up in the courtyard that served as a morgue for the 140 corpses that had been brought there.
Sam Pov, 43, was hovering above the body of his sister-in-law, 18-year-old Sann Ra. He displayed her national ID card and a portrait of her bright, eager face, framed by a pair of turquoise earrings. He said the family were Cham Muslims and desperate to take Samry home and bury her soon as possible, in accordance with their religion. Her grave had already been dug.
The girl’s mother stood to one side, weeping wildly into a krama. Mr Pov said both her parents had attempted suicide by jumping into the river after they discovered their daughter was dead.
Nearby, Nget Sokhoeurn kept watch over his 15-year-old nephew, Lanh Tou. He had placed a scrap of traditional magic fabric–a kranat yoan–over the boy’s face, and a bowl of rice porridge at his feet.
“I am hoping my nephew’s dead soul is not going to become a hungry ghost,” he explained.
Several high-level officials appeared at the scene, including Mok Chito, chief of the judicial bureau in the National Police, and deputy chairman of the National Committee for Disaster Management Nhim Vanda, who addressed reporters.
Mr Vanda said many were still missing but that about 60 percent of the dead had already been identified and packed for transport back to their home provinces.
“Such death is a sad and sorrowful event,” he said.
Dr Lim Oussa of Calmette said doctors were seeing many cases of shock, severe bruising and bone fractures, especially from those who had tried to jump off the bridge. Most of the dead had suffocated, he said.
Another doctor, who declined to be named, said the injuries they were treating were relatively minor because the worst off were already dead.
With a sudden influx of 182 patients at Calmette, dozens of people were sprawled on mats in corridors, many them too weary or shocked to speak.
Sixteen-year-old Chhim Chinda, lying in a hallway with an IV drip in her arm, said her mother and cousin had just been identified by relatives at the morgue in the courtyard. She said she had been jammed into place on the bridge for at least two hours before being pushed.
“Then I fainted after being stomped with human feet repeatedly,” she said. “When I woke up, I was here.”
At the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital, the emergency ward was filled with the fumes of ponlei, a traditional Khmer herbal remedy, as hovering family members tended to the 49 injured being treated there.
But far more bustling was the dirt courtyard where 139 dead bodies were being identified, packed in trucks and sent to their home provinces.
Ros Kong, deputy commander for the RCAF 90th Transportation Battalion and head of command at the hospital, said a total of 200 trucks had been deployed by the military to transport bodies home en masse.
RCAF ordered that every single body be taken home, even if an entire trip were required for a single body, he said.
By 1 pm, five trucks had already departed for Kompong Cham, Kompong Speu, Prey Veng, Svay Rieng and the outskirts of Phnom Penh, and another one was being packed for Kompong Cham.
“Kompong Cham province, Kompong Cham province!” organizers shouted through megaphones as families waiting by body bags began to line up and heave their corpses onto the truck.
“I don’t want to cry but I can’t stop,” said Chea Phearun, a border soldier, who was mopping his face with his shirt. “I cannot curb my tears. The tears drop because I feel so sorry to see the bodies of a nephew and two nieces lying along here…. They should not have died. They should have been able to grow up to lead and help their country.”
Outside the hospitals, the city’s streets were markedly quieter than usual, with many televisions tuned to news updates on the disaster.
A group of nuns returning from a Buddhist purification ceremony at Diamond Bridge said the whole nation was grieving.
“We are Cambodians and those dead people are Cambodians and so we feel sadness and want to share that sadness,” said Em Siem.
Near the bridge, which was still carpeted with abandoned shoes, crowds gathered yesterday evening to mourn and speculate about the disaster.
“It’s a bad bridge,” one man said.
“It’s going to be a historical bridge,” another concurred.
“This bridge should be knocked down,” said 47-year-old Soum Bunna. “It has bad memories for people. A terrible thing occurred there. I used to cross it all the time, but now I don’t want to cross again. I don’t even want to say the name anymore.”
