Bodies

Are still being found in New Orleans, in houses that have already been searched:

NEW ORLEANS, April 5 — When August Blanchard returned to New Orleans from Pennsylvania in late December, his mother was still missing. Family members, scattered across the country, had been calling hospitals, the Red Cross and missing persons hot lines, hoping she had been rescued.

But Mr. Blanchard, 26, had a bad feeling. Twice, he drove past the pale green house on Reynes Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, where he and his mother, Charlene Blanchard, 45, had lived, yet he could not bring himself to enter.

It was not until Feb. 25 that one of Mr. Blanchard’s uncles nudged the front door open with his foot and spied Ms. Blanchard’s hand. Dressed in her nightgown and robe, she lay under a moldering sofa. With her was a red velvet bedspread that her daughter had given her and a huge teddy bear.

The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans — in March alone there were nine, along with one skull. Skeletonized or half-eaten by animals, with leathery, hardened skin or missing limbs, the bodies are lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters or lying face down, arms outstretched on parlor floors. Many of them, like Ms. Blanchard, were overlooked in initial searches.

Having been to the area and seen the insides of structurally-sound houses in St. Bernard Parish that had not been touched since the storms, and having also seen the very much structurally-unsound houses in the Lower Ninth Ward, I can’t say that I’m surprised that bodies were overlooked. I’ll post up some pictures later that give you an idea of the difficulty of moving around inside a house where all the furniture and household goods have been tossed around by floodwaters. Add a caving-in roof or a dangerous structure (as well as tens of thousands of other homes that need to be searched for survivors), not to mention floodwater still standing in the home, and you can see why Ms. Blanchard’s body might not have been seen by searchers.

One of the things we were warned about during orientation was the possibility that we might encounter a corpse, human or animal. I believe one group did find a human body, and several had found those of animals.

Of course, another reason the searches were not completed was that the money ran out.

In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, there were grotesque images of bodies left in plain sight. Officials in Louisiana recovered more than 1,200 bodies, but the process, hamstrung by money shortages and red tape, never really ended…..

In October and November, the special operations team of the New Orleans Fire Department searched the Lower Ninth Ward for remains until they ran out of overtime money.

Half a dozen officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency rebuffed requests to pay the bill, said Chief Steve Glynn, the team commander. When reporters inquired, FEMA officials said the required paperwork had not been filed.

During that period, if someone called to ask that a specific location be checked for a body, Chief Glynn said, there was no one to send. The Blanchards were not the only family left to find a loved one on their own.

FEMA *still* can’t tell its ass from its elbow. And even this late in the game, they have no discernible plan, or at least no consistent one. For instance, they cut off funding to the base camp where the St. Bernard volunteers were staying. Then reinstated it. Then cut it again. And reinstated it again. They cut the transportation contract and reinstated it again. One of the latest things I heard was that the houses we worked so hard to gut were going to be bought up by the government, bulldozed and the land sold to a developer to build a golf course. One woman I met was denied a trailer because she had a “livable” house — a determination which had been made from the air while there was 10 feet of water in the house.

The scope of the damage is so, so vast, but it’s absolutely shameful that the funding and the staffing is not there so that people have to find the decomposing and half-eaten bodies of their loved ones on their own. And even though FEMA has now agreed to pay to search for the remaining bodies, they’re standing in the way of burial.

And finding a body is just the first step. Of the 14 bodies found since mid-February, none have been definitively identified and released for burial, partly because FEMA closed a $17 million morgue built to handle the dead from Hurricane Katrina. The morgue was used for eight weeks, and agency officials said there was no longer enough volume to justify keeping it open.

FEMA declined to allow the New Orleans coroner, whose own office and morgue were ruined in the storm, to continue to use the autopsy site.

For now, newly found bodies are stored in a refrigerated truck in Baton Rouge, La. The coroner, Dr. Frank Minyard, says a temporary office will be ready in about a week.

To Geneva Celestine, Ms. Blanchard’s mother, who was on the front porch of the house when her body was discovered, not being able to bury her daughter is only the latest in an exhausting series of horrors.

“It’s awful,” she said by telephone from Pennsylvania. “To go there and find your own child, something they’re supposed to be doing. Something they’ve got paid to do. And you see the mark on the house. It’s really sad.”