New York City’s Medical Examiner is now operating a long-term disaster morgue at Brooklyn’s 39th Street Pier, where human remains will be frozen inside freezer trucks, in an effort to provide relief to overwhelmed funeral directors still reeling from the COVID-19 crisis, city officials confirmed Monday.
Dina Maniotis, the chief of staff at the city medical examiner’s office, said the 39th Street Pier site near Green-Wood Cemetery would extend its hours starting Tuesday, to allow funeral homes to claim bodies between 8:30 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. and that the previous 15-day deadline for families to claim their loved ones had been lifted to provide further relief.
“We’re trying to support the funeral director community so they don’t have to rush and claim bodies; and then they’re struggling with the backlog to get them buried or the remains cremated,” Maniotis said on a press call hosted by Borough President Eric Adams Monday. "There is no need for them to worry or for families to worry that the remains will go to a city cemetery unless they specially ask for that option.”
The medical examiner’s office had previously planned to temporarily bury people on Hart Island, the city’s cemetery, when it ran out of space in its morgues and had decreased the number of days a family had to claim their loved one from an open-ended amount of time to just 15 days max.
Freezer trucks acting as overflow between hospitals and funeral homes in Brooklyn, May 4, 2020
Between March 23rd and April 24th, 522 people were buried on Hart Island, according to the city’s Correction Department, about four times as many people as usual.
But the city later backed away from that plan, instead switching to the use of freezers for long-term storage of bodies, according to a report by the Daily News in mid-April. City officials and the medical examiner’s office have repeatedly declined to provide specifics on how much space remains in the city’s disaster morgues.
On Monday’s press briefing, Michael DeLoach, a deputy commissioner with the city's Department of Environmental Protection, which is helping oversee the city’s COVID-19 response, declined to provide specifics when asked about the number of bodies currently being stored in freezers at the 39th Street Pier or how much space remained.
“We have enough capacity to handle the decedents that we have,” DeLoach said.
Michael Lanotte, executive director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association, said the city's capacity to hold onto bodies indefinitely would relieve stress on the overloaded death care industry.
“The additional morgue operating hours will also help funeral directors by providing them with evening hours for transfers since they spend the vast majority of the daytime hours conducting funerals, making arrangements and answering calls from families seeking their services,” said Lanotte.
Outside the pier where the trucks are located
The medical examiner’s comments come four days after the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatlands had its license revoked after dozens of decomposing bodies were found being stored in a lukewarm truck.
As of Sunday, 18,909 people have died from COVID-19, including 13,536 laboratory confirmed cases and additional 5,373 probable deaths, according to statistics from the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene. However the city has seen a surge in deaths from all causes since March 1st, according to preliminary statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, further overwhelming morgues, crematoriums, funeral homes and cemeteries.
During a three-month period beginning on February 1st, the federal government predicted an estimated 15,000 deaths in New York City. However, 32,281 New York City residents died in that time period, representing a 215 percent increase in the average NYC death count me time frame in normal years.
