Hundreds of Corpses of COVID-19 Deaths Stored for Months in Trucks on Brooklyn Waterfront
'07.05.2021'
Lyudmila Balabay
The bodies of hundreds of New Yorkers who have died from COVID-19 are still in the morgue trucks on the Brooklyn waterfront, despite a decline in incidence over the past few months and a lack of system congestion. New York Post.
Many of the bodies have been there for months. The remains of about 750 people are in long-term storage in a specially designed disaster relief morgue, which opened in April 2020.
It was created to give families extra time to organize funerals. The measure was supposed to be temporary, but the project was delayed.
“In the very near future, we will start notifying all the families we have worked with that we are now going to gradually scale back our operations, but will continue to work as needed,” said Dina Maniotis, deputy commissioner of the city's Main Department of Forensic Science.
The families of many of those whose bodies are still stored in these mobile mortuaries have asked the city to bury their remains on Hart Island, the city's public cemetery. According to Maniotis, others have stopped communicating with the city.
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City Councilor Mark Yonay asked why so many bodies are still stored in these trucks, although relatives asked to be buried on Hart Island.
In 2020, the city took the unprecedented step of placing bodies in mobile morgue trucks as morgues, hospitals and funeral homes were overcrowded in the early months of the region's pandemic. The bodies were placed in specially equipped refrigerators.
An emergency morgue has been set up on 39th Street Pier in Sunset Park, holding more than 2020 coronavirus victims at the same time in 1300.
Hart Island is the country's largest public cemetery, which is the final resting place of many unclaimed relatives of the city's dead. More than 1 million people are buried there, officials said.
Last year, there was a surge in burials on the island: in 2020, 2 bodies were interred here, while about 666 people were buried there annually. This year, as of the beginning of May, 1200 burials were made.
