Another Point of Singularity

BELLE CHASSE, Louisiana (Reuters) - In Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, the living mostly escaped Hurricane Katrina. Those already dead and buried were not so lucky.

Only three deaths were recorded here when the eye of the storm tore up the slip of land that follows the last bend of the Mississippi River as it spills into the Gulf of Mexico.

But more than two months later, local officials are still trying to identify dozens of concrete crypts, coffins, and bodies displaced by Katrina's high winds and water.

In some cases, now-anonymous remains lie out near grave sites where they have been bagged in black plastic, tagged with electrical tape and marked with exact geographic coordinates to await families to help with identifications.

Other coffins have been sealed up with the same blue tarps used to patch rooftops all over the storm-damaged Gulf Coast.

"I've had coffins in the tops of trees that I've had to take out with backhoes. I've had coffins in living rooms," said parish Councilman Mike Mudge, a plain-spoken former police detective who has made restoring the dead to their rightful resting places a personal quest.

"For the first month after the storm, I would come in here and our phones were ringing nonstop with coffin sightings."

The 15 cemeteries of the parish were ripped up by Katrina, which floated coffins from the above-ground crypts favored because of the high water table and lack of real soil.

In some cases, 3,000-pound (1,360-kg) crypts were flung from one bank to the Mississippi to the other by the high winds.

In others, Mudge said, "disenfranchised coffins" were found floating in backwaters where work crews marked their locations with long poles and whatever colorful debris they could find at hand: a plastic pumpkin or a statue of one of the saints.

The first priority was to get the dead away from roadways and the homes that some of the 24,000 residents -- many of them in shipping, fishing and oil -- are now returning to repair.

Said Mudge, "Looking at a coffin in a cemetery is not as horrifying as looking at a coffin where your coffee table used to be."

Parish President Benny Rousselle said he decided early that "no bodies would leave the parish" and that all the recovery work would be done locally, without federal involvement.

Rousselle put Mudge in charge of recovery efforts, reinforcing his crew with national guard troops and outfitting them with GPS tracking devices and airboats.

'DE-COFFIN AND RE-COFFIN' THE DEAD

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mudge said, had proposed a costly scheme to "de-coffin and re-coffin" the bodies and then ship them in refrigerated trucks to a joint morgue to await DNA testing by relatives.

"I said: 'Bud, this ain't baloney. You don't keep it on ice because you're going to need it tomorrow. These people have been dead for years,'" Mudge said of his talk with FEMA.

About 25 of the coffins displaced from the storm had been identified, Mudge said, and the thought of scattered dead bothers him.

"There's a saying, 'Rest in peace,' but ain't nothing restful," he said. "Now when they say dust to dust, that's an accurate statement."

At Tropical Bend Cemetery in Empire, Janice Andry, 52, has brought her 73-year-old mother, Vivian Taylor, to check on the grave sites of their extended family.

The plot for Andry's father, brother and sister is mostly undisturbed, although obscured by the kitchen and debris of a shredded house blown into the cemetery.

Her cousin, Poochie, is missing. Another female relative has also "taken a walk," she said, smiling.

Taylor, a regular at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, sees the destruction as evidence "that we are living in the end times."

Her daughter tries to cheer her, reminding her what she had said about the missing relative. "She said she couldn't wait to get up to the bright glory. She heard all that rumbling and thought it was time."

--Attribution: USA TODAY