While many of the survivors were 'shocked, filthy, choked with silt and half blind with oil', they were the lucky ones.
Identifying victims is a major task following any mass tragedy. A number of circumstances made this process particularly difficult at Tangiwai. The summer heat and lack of refrigerated facilities meant that the initial identification had to be carried out as quickly as possible, and, as a result, it was not accurate in every case. Some of those killed were recent arrivals to New Zealand who had no relatives or local medical or dental records to help identify them. A makeshift mortuary was set up at the army camp where police cleaned and laid out the bodies in coffins. Coroner's courts were hastily convened at Waiouru to legally determine identity where possible and issue death certificates. Pathologist Dr J.O. Mercer pronounced the main causes of death to be drowning and asphyxiation by silt.
After a few days the police inspector in charge, W.J.K. Brown, made the difficult decision to hold a mass identification to speed up the process. With clergy on hand to give support, he prepared the relatives for what to expect before inviting them to file past the partly opened coffins. This went as well as could be hoped, and the remaining unclaimed bodies were then transferred to hospital mortuaries in Wellington and Wanganui.
Christmas Day services throughout New Zealand gave people an opportunity to express their collective grief. Many messages of sympathy were received from overseas. Queen Elizabeth made her Christmas broadcast from Auckland, finishing with a message of sympathy for the people of New Zealand. There were more than a hundred private funerals, and on 31 December Prince Philip attended the state funeral for 21 unidentified victims who were buried in an 18-metre-long grave at Wellington’s Karori Cemetery. In April 1954 information obtained from overseas confirmed that several of these bodies had been misidentified. An order was obtained to exhume the graves, and the task was carried out by police recruits. The bodies of 16, including eight whose remains were never identified, continue to lie at the Tangiwai National Memorial at Karori.
