Hurricane Ida: Caskets Still Floating Across Louisiana

BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA — When Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana, the damage was stark and clear — more than 30 people died, a million lost power and close to $20 billion in damages were incurred. Ida was the most second-most damaging storm in state history behind Katrina.

One of the morbid, lingering problems caused by the storm? Caskets that were knocked loose by the storm and are now floating around across the state.

Those laid above the ground are particularly a problem.

“Some of those tombs weigh a couple of tons," the Rev. Haywood Johnson Jr., who lives in Ironton just south of New Orleans, told The Associated Press. "And the water just came and disrupted it like they were cardboard boxes. That was the force of the water."

The state formed a Cemetery Response Task Force to recover loose caskets after it became a problem during 2016 floods in Baton Rouge.

“They float," task force chairperson Ryan Seidemann told the AP. "They tend to go wherever the water goes. We’ve recovered them from yards, from levees, from underneath stairwells ... There’s no rhyme or reason, really, to where they come to rest, and then it’s kind of our logistical problem to figure out how to get them out of there.”

Identifying the people in some caskets can be difficult, although some caskets have a plastic "memory tube" with identifying information attached.

Seidemann told the AP it could take up to two years to recover all the caskets displaced by Hurricane Ida.