As Morgues Fill, NYC to Bury Some Virus Victims in Potter's Field

A spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday that it was likely some coronavirus victims would be sent to Hart Island, where for 150 years New York City has buried its unclaimed dead and those whose families are too poor to afford private burials.

The city has already begun to drastically increase interments on the island, to around 24 a day, as many as it would bury there in a week before the pandemic hit, according to the city’s Department of Correction, which runs the burial operation on the island.

It is unclear if those recently increased burials include those who have died from the coronavirus, or if they are people who passed away before the pandemic and were being moved from morgues to create space for the newly dead.

But funeral directors said they had been told that any coronavirus victims not claimed within two weeks will be buried on Hart Island, at least temporarily.

Recently, drone footage and images have circulated of burial crews in freshly dug muddy trenches burying body after body in bare wooden boxes. They have become searing illustrations of the pandemic’s ghastly mortal toll, along with those of field hospital tents in Central Park, a Navy hospital ship off Manhattan and refrigerated trailers parked outside hospitals to handle the overflow of bodies.

In normal times, an average of 150 people die every day in New York City. The virus has effectively doubled that, overwhelming funeral homes, crematories, cemeteries and city morgues. Nearly 120 morgue workers, assisted by more than 100 soldiers from the Army, the National Guard and the Air National Guard, are working in shifts around the clock, driving rented vans all over the city to pick up bodies.

This contingency burial plan involving Hart Island is part of an influenza pandemic surge plan created a decade ago by officials with the city’s medical examiner, said Councilman Mark Levine, who chairs the City Council’s Health Committee.

The plan is a touchy one because burials on the island, which is off-limits to the public, have long borne a stigma. Bodies interred on the island can be retrieved for later reburial, but it is certain to heighten the horror if relatives of COVID-19 victims find out that their loved one has been put in a wooden box and piled in a trench on a forbidden island overseen by the city’s jail system.

“It’s hard for New Yorkers to think about anybody being buried on Hart Island,” Levine said, “but it will be done in a dignified, orderly professional manner.”

The Hart Island plan will create an added layer of difficulty for overwhelmed funeral directors. They are running out of space to store bodies, given the wave of deaths and the postponement of many funerals because of social-distancing rules. Now they fear having to break more bad news to reeling families.

“Families who are already in shock have to hear that their loved is in a pine box going to an island where the city buries the homeless,” said Patrick Marmo, who owns six funeral homes in New York City.

More than 1 million New Yorkers are buried on Hart Island. The city still buries 1,000 bodies a year there, including unclaimed homeless, stillborn babies and poor New Yorkers whose families do not have the money to bury them.

The bodies arrive by ferry in bare wooden coffins and are stacked three high in rows of six, in trenches as long as a football field. The unmarked mass graves are dug by inmates bused and ferried over from the Rikers Island jail.

“It has a burial operation already so it will be a smoother transition” than other locations, Levine said.

In normal times, city officials often keep a body in a morgue for up to several months before sending it to Hart Island, to give themselves time to find relatives.

It was unclear if the recent surge in burials were bodies stored in morgues before the pandemic hit, or those felled by the virus. The city’s Department of Correction does not receive information on cause of death for recent burials, said a spokesman, Jason Kersten. He referred questions to the city medical examiner’s office, which did not return requests for comment.

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Correction officials have changed the long-standing burial process in order to handle more bodies. A bulldozer now loads caskets from truck to trench, which for decades was done manually by inmate workers.

New trenches can be dug as needed by heavy equipment in a matter of hours, Kersten said.

In another notable change, corrections officials announced this week that after decades of using inmates to bury the dead, they have begun using a team of ten privately contracted laborers for the job. They cited the health risk of transporting inmates to and from the island in close quarters. More than 275 inmates on Rikers Island have tested positive for the virus.

Before the change, corrections officials had been struggling to attract inmates for the job because hundreds had been released in an attempt to lower the risk of contagion at Rikers Island. Officials had already raised wages for the burial detail to $6 an hour from $1.50. (Inmates are not covered by minimum-wage laws.)

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Historically, city officials have long been reluctant to provide public access to Hart Island, which is said to be the largest public cemetery in the country.

The assemblage of crumbling buildings remaining on the island allude to its history, which includes roles as a prison camp during the Civil War, a psychiatric hospital, a tuberculosis sanitarium, a homeless center, and alcohol and drug treatment centers.

Correction officials map all burial locations so family members who are identified later, sometimes through DNA testing, can retrieve them. The department performs dozens of disinterments each year.

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On Sunday, the Hart Island Project, a nonprofit group that has pushed for more public access and awareness regarding the island, published a drone video taken April 2 apparently showing inmates helping to bury coffins on the island.

The nonprofit’s founder, Melinda Hunt, said Hart Island can accommodate several more decades of burials at the normal rate. She called the coronavirus burial plan the safest and most orderly method of emergency burial, especially because of the ability to reclaim the body for a private burial or cremations at a later date.

“This is a tried and tested system of burial, one the city used during the 1918 flu epidemic,” she said. “It works, and you want to go with a system that’s actually working. This is what we need.”

But Marmo, the funeral-home owner, called it a “nightmare scenario,” especially for people of lesser means.

“This is going to come at the expense of poor and uninformed New Yorkers with no connections or capacity to figure this out,” he said. “You take some poor person who’s quarantined and trying to find their aunt’s body. Are they really going to know they should call the medical examiner, and have all the proper information, to claim a body?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .