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| Louisiana hires firm to help recover bodies | |
| 2005-09-14 | |
Recovery of bodies from the storm-ravaged streets, homes and medical facilities of southeast Louisiana is expected to ramp up by week's end after state and local officials started howling Monday that corpses still dotted sidewalks and occupied long-drained buildings two weeks after Hurricane Katrina's landfall. State officials announced Tuesday that they had contracted directly with Kenyon International Emergency Services, which has been in the area under federal authority since Sept. 7 collecting the remains of dead hurricane victims. The state stepped in, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said, because federal emergency managers were not moving quickly enough to extend the short-term contract, which was set to expire Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a Kenyon spokesman said the company will boost the number of its workers on the ground to handle the increased workload as putrid flood waters recede in the hardest-hit neighborhoods. "Our numbers will increase," spokesman Bill Berry said. "We are prepared now to grow to meet the need. We would expect to see the roughly 115 people to increase by the tens and twenties at least, if not more." Kenyon, which worked at the World Trade Center site in 2001 and retrieved bodies of Australian citizens in Thailand after last year's tsunami, arrived in the New Orleans area nine days after Katrina under a short-term agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to support the state's Department of Health and Hospitals in its recovery of corpses. Under that arrangement, Berry said, Kenyon personnel, who are required to wear hazardous-material-proof suits and undergo toxic decontamination daily, were living at a Baton Rouge funeral home and commuting about four hours round-trip to visit work zones. They also traveled in civilian vans that could not access areas that had a few feet of water or downed trees, he said. "Nothing was made available to us," he said. "We have simply asked for that relief, and it had not yet been found." A FEMA spokesman could not be reached to respond to those comments. Berry said the state deal promises his company "proper lodging" somewhere in New Orleans, military vehicles to trudge through severely damaged areas and a central communications truck to dispatch tips about the location of corpses to forensic retrieval teams in the field. "We will have more commitment from the Louisiana National Guard in their support and escort duties," Berry said. "Things are just moving very effectively. They were already beginning to develop, but this is simply going to give us the might of the state of Louisiana that has the governor saying, 'Bring my people home. It has been long enough.'" David Passey, a FEMA spokesman, could not say why active-duty and National Guard soldiers have not been participating in body collection even though they constitute the largest relief personnel presence in the New Orleans area. "I don't know that they can't," Passey said. He speculated that it might be because state and federal authorities want to be sure the process is handled "with dignity" by people with experience in such delicate tasks. Another FEMA spokesman, Ricardo Zuniga, said Monday that the agency's policy bars military and municipal police officers from touching the bodies, except to tag them and report their location to other authorities."The general feeling is that if you have people who are trained and experienced, there's less likelihood that there would be a disturbance that would affect the identification of that individual," Passey said. Berry said Kenyon aims to collect corpses intact or in as "physically compact a group of remains as possible." He said victims have been found in various states: in large groups at nursing homes; floating in flooded basements amid bobbing machinery; and alone on city sidewalks. "We're finding remains in many different conditions," he said, adding that the recovery process is handled in a dignified manner based on "cultural" norms. No religious services are conducted at the site of retrieval. Blanco aides did not say how long Kenyon will be retained or how much it will be paid. Passey said the state will be reimbursed under FEMA's public-assistance program for any money it spends on corpse retrieval. | |
| Posted by:Steve |