Mortuary Set Up to Identify Katrina's Victims
A huge temporary mortuary is being established in St. Gabriel, a rural Louisiana town outside the state capital of Baton Rouge, where the bodies of those killed by Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed will be identified.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
Well, before anyone can move back, recovery teams must gather up the bodies of those who have died. Authorities are transporting the bodies to one central morgue run by a federal agency called the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. DMORT has commandeered a warehouse in the small town of St. Gabriel just outside Baton Rouge on the road to New Orleans. As NPR's Mike Pesca reports, St. Gabriel is a town with an interesting past and where residents have mixed feelings about being thrust into the history books once more.
MIKE PESCA reporting:
When the people of St. Gabriel saw the fliers around town announcing the town hall meeting on the Disaster Mortuary Operation Response Team, they saw right through the jargon and knew what was going on in the huge warehouse behind City Hall. Their town was the site of the main morgue coping with Katrina. Twenty-five-year resident Ellity Williams(ph) asked the question on a lot of people's minds.
Ms. ELLITY WILLIAMS (St. Gabriel Resident): I don't know exactly why they chose this town. I really don't.
PESCA: The answers provided by St. Gabriel Mayor George Grace couldn't be more straightforward: `We allowed them in because they gave us no choice.' In a federal disaster, someone looked at a map, saw the big warehouse right off a large road located between the disaster area and FEMA headquarters in Baton Rouge, and mandated that the morgue would go in St. Gabriel. But as Mayor Grace knows, the reason they chose St. Gabriel makes some sense. It has something to do with why they put two state jails here and why in 1905 in St. Gabriel, the state of Louisiana opened a home for people with Hansen's disease, commonly called leprosy. Mayor Grace said the people of St. Gabriel should remember that example.
Mayor GEORGE GRACE (St. Gabriel): Those people were brought here in the middle of the night with bells on, and for the next almost 50 years, that was the economic engine that drove this community. They came in. Everybody feared them, but as it turned out, when they closed it down, everybody was sad.
PESCA: Refrigerated semi trucks rolling past shotgun houses and down the dirt road leading to the morgue are an inconvenience, Mayor Grace says. But, he notes, there are bad things all around the town. A large number of oil and chemical companies in this part of Louisiana gave it its alarming and, recent research suggests, alarmist nickname Cancer Alley.
Unidentified Woman: And we recovered the individuals. They are in a body bag, in a contained biohazard body bag...
PESCA: The town meeting proceeded, as town meetings tend to, with a certain ebb and flow. The representative from DMORT couldn't answer all questions. She wouldn't say how many bodies there were, and she couldn't say how many they expected. These responses brought murmurs of discontent from the crowd.
(Soundbite of voices)
PESCA: The first people to question the mayor and Dr. Currenstern(ph) were the most apprehensive. The mayor reasoned with the crowd, which roughly reflected the demographic of this two-thirds black, one-third white community. At one point, he begged for compassion. `Most of the people in this morgue,' he told one African-American questioner, `were of our color.' Then the tide began to turn. `How can we help?' asked one woman. And then Emanuel Anderson took the floor. He quietly began.
Mr. EMANUEL ANDERSON (St. Gabriel Resident): I just want to say that I'm proud of St. Gabriel, you know what I mean? Yes. I mean, there are going to be a lot of bodies over there. They're going to try to keep the smell down and everything. All I'm trying to say is let's try to do our part to help the country. Let's try to help New Orleans. We're all alive and healthy, and the Lord has blessed us. We still have our homes. We can still eat. And there are people that are still in New Orleans that are still alive, and they haven't been rescued yet. So let's take that into consideration also.
(Soundbite of applause)
PESCA: It was the only sustained applause of the night. As a practical matter, it didn't matter if the people of St. Gabriel were on board or not. The feds said the morgue is going in St. Gabriel, and there was really nothing the citizenry could do about it. But as St. Gabriel Police Chief Kevin Ambeau quoted from the Bible, "My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge." Armed with facts and, frankly, given no other option, the people of St. Gabriel were forced to summon the better angels of their nature on this day. Mike Pesca, NPR News, Baton Rouge.
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