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West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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Written by DeadGirl
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Saturday, 18 February 2006 |
They are Hurricane Katrina's other victims: the coffins washed away by the storm's floodwaters. The mission to recover these bodies is one of the largest in U.S. history.
January 22, 2006
By Matthew Brown
A coffin in Cameron Parish was picked up and carried more than 33 miles by Hurricane Rita's storm surge before it landed beneath a highway overpass. In St. Bernard Parish, 80 tombs were broken open or washed away at a single graveyard, the Merrit Cemetery in Violet, during Katrina.
And, in Plaquemines Parish, six caskets -- three still in their cement tombs -- were lifted from the east bank of the Mississippi River in Point a la Hache, carried across the river, and found weeks later in a patch of woods on the west bank.
They are the hurricane season's other victims: 1,500 of the dead from across the Gulf Coast roused from their not-so-eternal rest when their caskets were wrenched away by floodwaters.
Harrowing tales of survival and the tragedy of more than 1,300 dead from the storm have dominated the public's attention in recent months. But what happened to the already-dead can be told only in the barest detail, and attempts to return them to grave sites in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas have taken place in relative obscurity.
Despite the scant publicity, the casket recovery effort has emerged as the largest in recent U.S. history, eclipsing the 800 graves disturbed in 1993 during epic flooding across the Midwest, said Chuck Smith, commander of the federal Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, or DMORT, which is coordinating the recovery from the hurricane morgue in Carville.
Already, almost 1,000 bodies have been returned to their graves or positively identified. Many had steel nameplates affixed to their caskets or were found near empty tombs, an obvious connection. Through last week, the identities of 143 more bodies taken to Carville had been established through dental records, telltale broken bones or unique items left in caskets such as a Mardi Gras doll, a fishing pole and even bottles of malt liquor.
But authorities in Louisiana and Mississippi have been unable to affix names to more than 500 others. That compares with about 120 direct storm casualties who remain unidentified.
Cemeteries in New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, where waters rose more gradually, also suffered some damaged graves, but no substantial number of caskets dislodged or left unidentified. Those parishes are not included in Louisiana's tally of 1,300 disinterred remains to date, Smith said.
Some of the dead were found secure in their caskets, but with no obvious clue as to who they were. Others were just bundles of bones, now piled into body bags. The unidentified are being stored in refrigerated trailers parked behind the Carville morgue, 21 sets of remains to a trailer.
Missing tomb
Among them, Edith LeFrance of Happy Jack hopes authorities will find her parents, Frank and Mildred LeFrance. She vividly recalls the Sunday in September when a friend said the tomb that had held her parents was missing from the Barthelemy Cemetery in Diamond.
"She said, 'Your Daddy's not in there,' and I said, 'He's not in there?' And we went down and everything was gone. He wasn't there and my mom wasn't there, either. Everything was gone. Everything. It's just a big hole now," LeFrance said. "That's all I have besides my children. I just hope I can find them and put them in the right spot."
Dozens of cemeteries in at least 10 Louisiana parishes, two counties in Mississippi and one county in Texas were affected by Rita and Katrina. In most cases, the force of the storm surge wiped out tombs, leaving caskets to float away on the current.
In the metropolitan area, Plaquemines had about 300 remains disturbed; St. Bernard, more than 200; and St. Tammany Parish, 33, officials said. Elsewhere, the disinterred include an estimated 350 graves and tombs in Cameron, 160 in Vermilion Parish, about 190 in Harrison and Hancock counties in Mississippi, and smaller numbers in St. Mary and Terrebonne parishes and Jefferson County, Texas.
The grisliest scenes occurred where the storm surges were the most violent, in coastal communities dotted with small family graveyards that date back a century or more.
Upheaval
"What this storm did not only to many of our cemetery victims, but also to the people who were alive, the storm ripped the clothing off these folks and also any jewelry or anything else they had on that might have identified them," Harrison County, Miss., Coroner Gary Hargrove said.
At least 14 caskets reported missing in Mississippi and an unknown number in Louisiana might have been swept out to sea or sunk in rivers, officials fear.
Smith, a former coroner's office investigator from Baton Rouge, is one of about 80 funeral directors, medical examiners and forensic specialists working at Carville.
"I worked the Oklahoma City bombings, the space shuttle Columbia, the Olympic Park bombing and New York City," he said. "This thing was just off the scale from a disaster management standpoint. Much, much more complex than any of those."
The hunt for caskets began within days of Katrina's landfall.
In Plaquemines, the task fell to Parish Councilman Mike Mudge. Mudge's Belle Chasse-area district fared well in the storm and had no disturbed cemeteries. He was "volunteered" for the recovery job after telling Parish President Benny Rousselle that something needed to be done about the hundreds of coffins scattered through lower Plaquemines communities.
With the help of Albertine Kimble, a parish employee who knew how to pilot an air boat, and Donald Sullivan, who once worked with Mudge in the Plaquemines Sheriff's Office, he began pulling caskets out of muddy swamps and dense woods, off levees and highways.
Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams elsewhere in the state were using computer storm surge models to trace casket paths. Mudge said his small group merely followed the lines of debris stretching away from cemeteries. Inevitably, he said, the trails led to remains.
"You find one and you look up and then there'd be more, and then there'd be more," he said. "What we're doing is real painful to some people. I have people ask me, 'Why are you doing this?' Let me tell you something, every time you pick up somebody's coffin, that's somebody's mama, somebody's daddy, somebody's daughter."
Casket codes
Since the 1960s, after other mass disinterments following hurricanes, the dead often were buried with glass tubes containing paper records of who they were. Kimble said the tubes were still in many of the caskets she found but most of the paper had disintegrated.
Wanting to take care of their own, Plaquemines Parish officials initially resisted outside assistance in its search for remains. But after most of the scattered caskets had been gathered, Mudge invited the DMORT team into the parish earlier this month to help with those that remained unknown.
Working with Mudge and Kimble through the Roxie James Cemetery in Port Sulphur, the federal team began by photographing each casket
A code was spray-painted on the casket signifying the parish and cemetery where it was found, plus an identification number for the body. Bones or other remains that had been washed out in the flood were carefully swept up with a dust broom and put back into the casket.
The coffin then was tied shut with rope, wrapped in a blue tarp and sealed with duct tape. As the team moved to the next set of remains, Mudge picked up the secured casket with a small forklift and loaded it into the back of a truck.
Wooden caskets often had deteriorated in their tombs, leaving jumbles of bones, cloth and bits of wood that the team would place into body bags, then haul to the truck by hand.
During the next two weeks, the team shipped 162 sets of remains from Plaquemines to Carville, including 21 from Roxie James Cemetery. Mudge said he expects remains to turn up for months or years, in unchecked corners of the marsh or beneath piles of storm debris.
Once at Carville, the remains are unwrapped and carefully inventoried. X-rays are taken to compare against tens of thousands of soggy dental and medical charts recovered from doctors' offices. Casket types are checked against mortuary records. If no identification is made immediately, the remains go back into the refrigerated trailers.
DNA tests
In Mississippi, Hargrove, the Hancock coroner, is gathering DNA from family members in hopes the genetic material will help identify all 23 sets of unknown remains there. The effort so far is being financed at the local level.
In Louisiana, Smith said DNA tests are being run on those who died during or because of the storm, but not before it.
"The cost-benefit ratio just didn't allow us to do it," he said. He added that most of the dead who might have been identified through DNA died recently enough that other information also should lead to a match.
But at least some of the disinterred appear fated to eternal anonymity, because they are simply too old or too deteriorated to make a match, Smith said.
Mudge told of a set of remains found on the back side of a levee in lower Plaquemines: "They found two socks, a leg bone and a skull. That one's going to be MIA. He's never going to be known," he said.
Named or not, all the remains eventually will be shipped back to their parish of origin, in new steel caskets like those used by the U.S. military.
Of those that have been identified, families will have the option to rebury them in the same cemetery or transfer them elsewhere. The federal government will pay the cost of reburial in public cemeteries, but not in private, family cemeteries.
For Barry Turner, whose father, maternal grandparents and several aunts and uncles were among those once buried at Roxie James Cemetery, there's no question about returning his ancestors to Port Sulphur.
"That's the community. That's the family," he said. "We're going to try to connect the vaults together, and hopefully that will be enough weight to keep them from moving."
http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-4/1137913861254530.xml
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.” Bertolt Brecht
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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