Tracing the Path of a Corpse
This is a story written around the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina that I found while researching a story I am writing on the third anniversary. It is well worth a read, although sad on many different levels.
More than a week after Hurricane Katrina nearly leveled this city, workers newly assigned to collect the dead stopped on a downtown street. There before them, on its back, lay another corpse, all but baked into a pose of submission by several hot suns.
[....]
But Hurricane Katrina denied most of the 1,464 victims in Louisiana such final flourishes of dignity; no watch chains for them, no stylish hats. The hurricane scattered bodies over hundreds of square miles, where water, heat and time distorted what many of the dead looked like in life. It was a forensic hell.
The system hastily conceived to fulfill a sacred mission—to collect, identify and release for burial hundreds of bodies—descended at times into the common ineptness of a motor vehicles bureau, ill equipped to deal with wholesale catastrophe. As a result, many families waited far too long for the release of identified bodies, delaying burial, prolonging grief.
Defying the bureaucratic impediments, pathologists, investigators and counselors rose to the sorrowful challenge. Working like wartime MASH units, they reunited families with their missing loved ones and attached names to nearly 900 of the bodies they examined. Even so, some 50 victims remain unknown to the world still, a year later.
“I wish we could have identified everybody,” Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state medical examiner, said. “Ninety-nine percent is a failing rate if it’s your kid missing. That’s the bottom line.”
