New York City announced that Hart Island would be used as a mass burial site for unclaimed victims during the Covid-19 pandemic. A drone launched by the Hart Island Project took video footage of the football field long trench where the dead are buried in simple pine boxes, three deep. A fork lift is used to bring the boxes into the trench and then workers stack the boxes three deep and re-enforce them with plywood before covering them with a layer of dirt.
The island has a long history of being the final resting place for the homeless and indigent. An estimated twenty-five people used to be buried each month, but now over 25 people are buried each day. The bodies arrive by ferry from City Island in the Bronx.
Melinda Hunt of the Hart Island Project said on Twitter, “Hart Island burials are not disrespectful. There is not enough testing to know how many people buried died
of complications from COVID-19. Many families have no choice.” She said, “Hart Island is the most democratic place. Everybody is
handled the same. There is a beauty to that.”
The city purchased Hart Island in 1868 and turned it into a public cemetery. Over 150 years, the island has served as burial ground to victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and the AIDS crisis in the 1980. It is the largest national cemetery in the United States, but has been largely inaccessible to the public. The island also was a prison workhouse, a Civil war Union solider training site,
and prisoner of war camp for Confederate fighters. It once harbored
yellow fever and tuberculosis victims. More than a million New Yorkers have been laid to rest on the small
strip of land off the coast of the Bronx, soldiers, the poor and the
unclaimed, the homeless and stillborn babies.
The city is transferring unclaimed bodies to the 101-acre island to make
way for Covid-19 victims whose bodies are claimed. New rules will require remains to be taken to the island if
they go unclaimed for two weeks. The city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner will hold an individual for 14 days during the pandemic, after that, they are taken to the island. Burials are done with ledgers and a grid system so that the bodies can be located and disinterred should a family come forward to claim them and wish to rebury them. Families would have to hire a funeral home to pick up the remains. There is no charge for disinterment.
Hunt said. “This is where the majority of Covid-19 victims are going to
be buried. It disproportionately affects the low income community who
can’t really isolate and avoid using the subways. By the same token
those same people can’t afford a funeral.”