Last month’s disastrous flooding not only destroyed tens of thousands of homes and vehicles in the Capital Region, it also unburied and scattered hundreds of coffins from about 50 area cemeteries, The New York Times reports. That’s kept Arbie Goings, a veteran of disaster mortuary work, busy as a “cemetery recovery consultant” in Denham Springs, which took the brunt of the flooding.
But the occurrence of flood-tossed tombs is not a new phenomenon in south Louisiana, where some 1,500 graves were disrupted by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Isaac dislodged about 200 coffins seven years later. Goings and other Louisianans are now using past experiences and new technology to experiment with new ways of locating lost tombs and returning them to their proper cemeteries.
“We built an app,” says Henry Yennie, a senior official at the state Department of Health in charge of tracking the hospitalized, the missing and the dead after disasters.
Earlier this year, Yennie and others in charge of tracking graves glued electronic beacons to a few vaults near an often-flooded bayou outside New Orleans that were known to be “frequent floaters.” They worked. But the app was built to address lingering questions about how the beacons would be reliably attached, who would attach them and what would happen when the batteries died.
The idea is to place inconspicuous bar codes on all new coffins and tombs. These codes, as Yennie demonstrates with his phone, could be scanned and then the app would provide identifying information about who is inside. The concept is in its early stages, he says, but it is promising.
A pair of retired LSU faculty members are also working on solutions to the problem. In recent years, retired LSU researcher Jessica Schexnayder and a retired LSU anthropologist have been mapping graveyards all over south Louisiana before coastal sinking, storm surge, erosion or flooding eventually take many of them out to sea. Their work has been used by state officials after previous storms, though some people had thought it not particularly applicable here on the outskirts of Baton Rouge.
“When I decided to map the cemeteries in Denham Springs, I got a little pushback because Denham Springs is not coastal,” Schexnayder says. She would reply that the threat to many of these cemeteries was a matter of when, not if.
“Now in 2016,” she adds, “here’s the ‘when’ moment.”
