A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.

"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.

Public health protection and identification of bodies are tasks for DMort, Buckner said. Teams include morticians, medical examiners, coroners, pathologists, anthropologists, odontologists, dental assistants, photographers, police, DNA, X-ray, evidence, fingerprint, mental health and computer specialists, and others such as heavy equipment operators.

"Until they search each and every remaining house and remove all the fallen materials ... they will not know how many people are there," Buckner said.

"My personal opinion is they will be recovering bodies for 30 ... to 120 days," Buckner said.

That's because of "the sheer destruction, the rubble that will have to be removed and to find bodies in attics and yards and the water," he said. People "were told to go to their attic. Then the water came up and they had no way to escape.

"Firemen chopped holes in roofs and found bodies."

There are no words.