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New Orleans' city-run cemeteries lacking grave diggers

Written by DeadGirl
Sunday, 23 July 2006
7/23/2006 The Associated Press Â Â NEW ORLEANS (AP) ï¿½ The city of New Orleans' cemetery division is down to a post-Katrina skeleton crew ï¿½ and that means there are not city workers available to bury the dead. We do not dig graves or put caskets into graves any longer," said city real estate administrator Ed Mazoue, who is in charge of the cemeteries. "The decision was made and funeral homes were notified that families and funeral homes would have to supply grave-digging personnel." The staff shortage stems from several factors: workers not returning after Hurricane Katrina, including superintendent of cemeteries Andrea Davis; city layoffs that occurred before and after the storm; and low civil service wages, Mazoue said. Starting pay for city grave diggers is $5.15 an hour. "You're in the sun and rain at minimum wage when you can go to McDonald's or Burger King and get $10 an hour," Mazoue said. Veteran groundskeeper Henry "Red" Nelson, one of only two full-time city cemetery employees, said he is depending on "a man who used to work in the graveyard" and the man's nephew to dig graves. That's a far cry from the seven staff members, five of them field workers, who were in the cemetery division last year. The city administers services at six cemeteries: Carrollton, Holt, Lafayette Nos. 1 and 2, St. Mary's and Valence. Total burials at the sites each year averaged 350-400 before Katrina, Mazoue said. The city also owns the Indigent Cemetery on Old Gentilly Road in eastern New Orleans, but burials do not take place there "on a day-to-day basis," he said. That cemetery is reserved for people who "absolutely can't afford to bury anywhere else" and for unidentified bodies. If a bereaved family chooses to do the grave digging, "I guess the city'll let them do it," Nelson said last week, noting that the responsibility for getting the job done would be theirs. When a burial is taking place at a city cemetery, and Lamano-Panno-Fallo Funeral Home is handling the service, "we will contact someone that we know" to dig the grave "and we will have the family pay that person when they get to the cemetery," funeral home secretary Laura Patrick said last week. If the gravedigger is not available, "the family has to find their own," she said. "It's a little aggravating, but that's the city for you." Arranging for gravediggers with private cemeteries has not been a problem, she said. When Gerard Matherne and his family buried his 53-year-old sister, Alice Fay, in May at Carrollton Cemetery, Leitz-Eagan funeral home directed him to arrange for gravediggers with the resident caretaker. However, there were problems. Matherne said that when it was time to place his sister's coffin in the uncovered tomb called a coping, which is soil boxed in by cement walls standing about three feet high, the two cemetery workers on hand could not handle the job. "All the pallbearers had to put her in the ground," said Matherne's brother, Michel. "We had to just finagle her in by standing on the next grave, and I slipped and fell." http://www.nola.com/newsflash/louisiana/index.ssf?/base/news-26/1153673667312840.xml&storylist=louisiana

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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