New York City hires laborers to bury dead in Hart Island potter's field
amid coronavirus surge
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[April 10, 2020]
By Lucas Jackson and Brendan McDermid
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City
officials have hired contract laborers to bury the dead in its potter's
field on Hart Island as the city's daily death rate from the coronavirus
epidemic has reached grim new records in each of the last three days.
The city has used Hart Island to bury New Yorkers with no known next of
kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral since the 19th
century.
Typically, some 25 bodies are interred each week by low-paid jail
inmates working on the island, which sits off the east shore of the
city's Bronx borough and is accessible only by boat. That number began
increasing in March as the new coronavirus spread rapidly, making New
York the epicenter of the global pandemic.
There are about two dozen bodies a day, five days a week buried on the
island, said Jason Kersten, a spokesman for the Department of
Correction, which oversees the burials.
Before burial, the dead are wrapped in body bags and placed inside pine
caskets. The deceased's name is scrawled in large letters on each
casket, which helps should a body need to be disinterred later. They are
buried in long narrow trenches excavated by digging machines.
"They added two new trenches in case we need them," Kersten said. To
help with the surge, and amid an outbreak of the COVID-19 respiratory
illness caused by the virus at the city's main jail, contract laborers
have been hired, he said.
"For social distancing and safety reasons, city-sentenced people in
custody are not assisting in burials for the duration of the pandemic,"
Kersten said.
A barge could be seen arriving at the island on Thursday morning with a
refrigerated truck aboard containing about two dozen bodies.
The department referred questions about causes of death to the city's
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). Aja Worthy-Davis, a
spokeswoman, said it would take time to collate individual causes of
death from the office's records, but it was probable some of the recent
burials include those felled by the coronavirus.
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Drone pictures show bodies being buried on New York's Hart Island
where the department of corrections is dealing with more burials
overall, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in New
York City, U.S., April 9, 2020. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
The island may also be used as a site for temporary interments
should deaths surge past the city's morgue capacity, a point that
has not yet been reached, Kersten and Worthy-Davis said.
"We're all hoping it's not coming to this," Kersten said. "At the
same time, we're prepared if it does."
OCME can store about 800 to 900 bodies in its buildings, and has
room to store about 4,000 bodies in some 40 refrigerated trucks it
can dispatch around the city to hospitals, which typically have only
small morgues, Worthy-Davis said.
Another island to the south of Hart, Randall's Island in the East
River, is being used as a parking depot for dozens of empty
refrigerated trucks between deployments outside city hospitals.
On Thursday, two trucks containing bodies that had been parked
outside a hospital were temporarily moved back to the island depot,
in a stadium parking lot, to make way for a delivery of oxygen and
other supplies at the hospital.
"They will not stay there," Avery Cohen, a City Hall spokeswoman,
wrote in an email.
City health officials could be seen on Thursday transferring bodies
from the two trucks into three hearses dispatched by funeral homes.
(Reporting by Lucas Jackson, Brendan McDermid and Jonathan Allen;
Editing by Bill Berkrot and Leslie Adler)
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