Slidell, LA - Almost two years after Hurricane Katrina, dozens of damaged graves and tombs at Porter's Cemetery east of Slidell serve as silent reminders of the hurricane's force and fury. Burial vaults, which were carried hundreds of yards from the family cemetery by Katrina's storm surge, line the front of the graveyard awaiting a return to their original locations. Tombs are cracked and destroyed, exposing caskets. Headstones and grave markers are in disarray.

"The water came in so fast with so much force that caskets and vaults were scattered everywhere," St. Tammany Parish Councilman Ken Burkhalter said. "They floated out and were carried into the woods, into people's yards."

Burkhalter has relatives buried in the cemetery at the end of Indian Village Road near the West Pearl River. And he and his father, Sam Burkhalter, are building a new tomb for Kevin and Anita Burkhalter --- the councilman's brother and sister-in-law -- who were buried in the cemetery in 1988.

"We're bolting it down with metal rods so it won't float away," Burkhalter said. "Then, we're going to put brick around it."

The storm surge bashed in his brother's casket, Burkhalter said, and his remains, identified through DNA, are being kept by the New Orleans coroner's office until the new resting place can be built. Anita Burkhalter's remains are inside a burial vault within the couple's destroyed tomb.

Burkhalter said he is spending $4,000 to $5,000 to build the new tomb. But he wonders about the fate of other damaged graves and tombs at the cemetery.

"We have elderly people who have family members buried here, but they don't have the money or resources to put their beloved ones back to rest," Burkhalter said. "They had their homes destroyed. They're in FEMA trailers, still waiting on Road Home money to put their lives back together."

"To me, this (restoring the cemetery) should be part of the recovery process," Burkhalter said. "It should qualify for some type of assistance to put the place back together."

But so far, help hasn't been coming, he said.

"We need some kind of coordinated effort, to try to identify who's who and where they belong, so we can try to put things back like they were," Burkhalter said.

Mark Lombard, chief investigator for the St. Tammany Parish coroner's office, said his agency is more than willing to help put burial vaults and crypts back where they belong.

But the coroner's office needs someone, such as family members or cemetery caretakers, to identify the exact locations of the gravesites and where displaced vaults should be placed. "We'd be more than glad to help out in any way we can," Lombard said. "We could even get the equipment for a day or two to do what needs to be done."

About a month after Katrina, the coroner's office secured a giant government forklift with a boom to retrieve crypts, vaults and caskets washed away by Katrina in southeastern St. Tammany cemeteries.

Forty-eight vaults were retrieved by office investigators and were returned to their respective cemeteries, Lombard said. But the vaults were placed in front of the cemeteries because investigators weren't sure of the exact burial locations, he said.

Eight of the vaults had broken caskets with exposed remains, which were put into body bags and sent to the central Katrina morgue and later taken to the New Orleans coroner's office to await reclamation, he said.

They include the remains of Kevin Burkhalter and remains found in a crushed vault and casket now sitting in front of a family cemetery at the end of McManus Road east of Slidell.

Most of the cemeteries damaged by Katrina have been restored. But Porter's Cemetery and Dubuisson Cemetery in Bayou Liberty were the hardest hit and the most damaged, Lombard said.

Porter's Cemetery looks almost the way it did a month after Katrina, Burkhalter said. "We haven't had anyone buried here since the storm," he said.

The cemetery, about a quarter-mile from the West Pearl River, has at least 100 gravesites and is decades old, Burkhalter said. One grave marker shows a death date in 1912.

The cemetery survived Pearl River floods and other hurricanes with little or no damage, Burkhalter said. "Nothing came through here like Katrina," he said.

http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/07/cemetery_still_bears_scars_of.html