Post #195208 by cynfulcynner on Fri, Oct 28, 2005 12:58 AM

from the New York Times

Coffins and Buried Remains Set Adrift by Hurricanes Create a Grisly Puzzle

BATON ROUGE, La., Oct. 24 - The living were not the only ones uprooted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The force of the storms literally raised the dead from their resting places in peaceful parish cemeteries, sending nearly a thousand coffins and vaults floating across the Gulf Coast and creating a macabre puzzle for Louisiana coroners and morticians. Storm surges as high as 20 feet transformed two-ton concrete vaults, tombs and coffins into virtual ships that traveled for miles across parish lines, landing in front yards, fields and swamps. One barnacle-encrusted vault found underwater in a marsh is thought to have been a victim of Hurricane Audrey in 1957.

A coffin showed up on the lawn of Dr. Bryan Bertucci, the coroner of St. Bernard Parish. And later, a parish resident informed Dr. Bertucci that he found the remains of his grandmother, still wearing her pink gown, out of her grave in a local cemetery.

"Coffins were torn out of mausoleums like a child's blocks," Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state emergency medical director, said. "There are a lot. It is very disturbing to a lot of families who want their loved one. It is very disturbing."

Many of the coffins lack identification, so the task of learning the identity of the remains and returning them to their cemeteries is falling on the shoulders of medical examiners and coroners around the state, already overburdened with the victims of the most recent storms. An official said 137 disinterred remains, 80 of which were in their coffins, had been taken to the same temporary morgue that the state set up for Hurricane Katrina victims, while parish coroners would handle others.

Some coffins built in the 1960's and later contain burial scrolls with the names of the dead screwed into the exterior. In other cases, workers can trace the coffins using manufacturer's serial numbers and hand-drawn cemetery maps. Some family members have identified relatives through rosaries, scars, pacemakers or X-ray evidence of fractures. If embalming is intact, a visual identification can sometimes be made or DNA matching can be helpful.

"Cemeteries are very important to people in the South," Dr. Cataldie said. "We take care of our dead. In those cemeteries they find their memories and their childhoods. It's important to give them their mommies, daddies and grandparents back."

Federal officials from the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, known as Dmort, are assisting local officials in finding and identifying the remains, using marsh buggies, airboats and helicopters. New coffins are found every day, sometimes in trees.

Exposed skeletal remains have been salvaged from between cracked statues of Jesus and Mary. Like the remnants of classical antiquity, marble figures with broken wings rest on wasted cemetery lawns, lying among toppled headstones, some with inscriptions like "Hunting in Heaven." Empty graves look like spaces between teeth. A mausoleum appears like a desk emptied of its drawers.

"Many are in extremely remote and inaccessible areas," Don Kelly, a spokesman for Dmort, said. "They have been carried way downrange into muck and swamp and forest."

Family members fear that relatives, buried years ago, are now hidden in unknown fields, their bodies and stories lost.

"The first place they came was their cemeteries," said Zeb Johnson, an investigator for the Calcasieu Parish coroner in far southwestern Louisiana and the owner of Johnson Funeral Home in Lake Charles, who receives constant phone calls. "This may go on for years."

A few miles away in the town of Creole, the Sacred Heart Cemetery is full of disturbed graves.

"You just can't imagine that water can be that destructive," said Eloucia S. Richard, 78, a retired teacher who came to the cemetery to check on the grave of her husband, Dalton J. Richard, which was intact.

"I knew everybody," said Ms. Richard, crying when she saw dead friends missing. "I knew where everybody lived."

Two missing from the mausoleum were her students, and she thought that there might be more.

"I know them very well, playing football," she recalled. "Such a horrible thing. I knew these people. Where did they go?"

In St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans, Merrick Cemetery is one of many devastated graveyards. Situated in a historically black section of Violet, it is full of cinderblock tombs built by neighborhood residents, who often painted them on the birthdays of the dead.

Larry M. Aisola, 32, a lawyer, would like to know where his dead grandfather and mother are, as well as his grandmother, buried days before Hurricane Katrina hit.

"They've got to go back," Mr. Aisola said. "The problem is trying to figure out how to put them back together."