In Ike’s wake, reburying the dead is a grim task

IN THE MARSH OF CAMERON PARISH, La. (AP) — Joe Johnson craned his neck from the airboat as it circled a patch of brown marsh grass. The runaway coffin was not where it was supposed to be.

Johnson pulled up to a pile of rocks, killed the motor and hopped out. After a few minutes of scouring along the tall, reedlike grass, he flagged down two fishermen.

“Can you possibly take me along the shoreline?” Johnson asked. “I’m looking for a casket.”

Beyond the usual, dismal rebuilding, Hurricane Ike left another grim task when it struck last month: Its 13-foot storm surge washed an estimated 200 coffins out of their graves, ripping through most of Cameron Parish’s 47 cemeteries and others in southwest Louisiana and coastal Texas. Some coffins floated miles into the marsh.

At Hollywood Cemetery in Orange, Texas, Ike unearthed about 100 coffins. Dozens more were disgorged in hard-hit Galveston.

Officials in coastal areas have long struggled with interring the dead, as coffins buried in low-lying areas are susceptible to being belched up by floodwaters. Some areas — most notably New Orleans — house the dead in above-ground crypts to keep them from drifting away in storms.

For many of the dead forced up by Ike, it wasn’t their first disturbance. About 80 percent of the coffins in southwest Louisiana displaced by Ike were rousted by Hurricane Rita just three years earlier, said Zeb Johnson, the Calcasieu Parish deputy coroner who’s headed coffin recovery efforts for Rita and Ike.

Of the coffins ejected by Rita in September 2005, 335 were found and reburied, he said. Eighteen were never found.

“Our mother came out for Rita, and now she came out for Ike,” said Debra Dyson, a commercial fisher whose house in Cameron was destroyed by Ike.

Dyson said coffins holding her brother-in-law and cousin also were heaved out by Rita. Ike was worse — the storm thrust out coffins containing her mother, brother-in-law, cousin, niece, three uncles and two aunts.

The one containing Dyson’s mother floated to the same spot it came to rest after Rita, 22 miles from the cemetery. Only this time, it didn’t take nine months to find it.

“It’s hard to lose your home, but the first stop you make is that cemetery just to make sure they’re still there, and it’s heartbreaking when they’re not,” said Marilyn Dyson Elizondo, Dyson’s sister who lives in Dayton, Texas.

Zeb Johnson helms a team of two employees, volunteer boat pilots and state prisoners to search hundreds of miles of marsh with loaned equipment and haul coffins back to shore. The work is backbreaking, with coffins weighed down by mud in swampy areas teeming with alligators and snakes and the stench of rotting marsh grass.

“It’s a job that has to be done,” said Joe Johnson, a funeral director and embalmer from Lake Charles who is not related to the deputy coroner.

Joe Johnson’s half-hour ride with the fishermen didn’t turn up the pink coffin reported to the coroner’s office, like so many other tips that don’t pan out. An hour later, however, he returned with another coffin found in thick grass near a canal bank.

A hole was drilled into the silver metal container to drain out marsh muck and lighten the load for the airboat. Prisoners pulling the coffin from the boat tipped it again to empty out more of the fetid water.

The coffin was trucked to the city coliseum in Lake Charles, where the Federal Emergency Management Agency was providing refrigerated trucks to hold coffins until reburial arrangements could be made.

The Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office is footing most of the search and recovery bill, which hasn’t been tallied. But reburying the dead is estimated to cost as much as $100,000 on top of the recovery costs, with much of the money needed for new coffins and vaults. Zeb Johnson wasn’t sure who’ll cover that price tag, so he wasn’t sure when reburial could begin.