Work continues on replacement and identification of caskets at Plainview Cemetery in Denham Springs. Twenty-two caskets remain unidentified.
DENHAM SPRINGS – Casket identification remains an issue in a cemetery a full year after the Great Flood of 2016 disturbed grave sites – and the remaining work could pose the biggest challenge.
Work continues on burial sites at Plainview Cemetery along Magnolia Beach Road, but the process of identifying caskets has proven difficult, according to Arbie Goings, who serves in an advisory capacity as a cemetery recovery consultant for the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
Officials have overseen identification of 254 of the 276 grave sites disturbed during the flood.
The cases ranged from damaged headstones to full vault displacement at the largely African-American cemetery, which has been in place more than 75 years, when state law mandated racially segregated burial sites.
“We still have quite a few who are unidentified. We strongly encourage those who have loved ones buried out here but haven’t had an opportunity to visit,” he said. “People are still dealing with flooded houses, but they should come out and check out their loved one’s graves to see if they’re disturbed.”
The remaining 22 could pose the biggest challenge, said Goings, who worked 30 years as a funeral director.
“Many people are still dealing with flooded houses,” he said.
Plainview’s classification as a private cemetery complicates matters because each grave qualifies as an individual claim through FEMA, said Goings, who helped with the identification of bodies after 9/11 and following Hurricane Katrina.
“This is a huge cemetery, with over 800 graves and, unfortunately, some were never marked to begin with,” Goings said. “Some families never got around to putting a marker on the graves, which makes the process much harder.”
The FEMA assistance cap of $33,000 further complicates matters.
In a parish in which more than 80 percent of the homes flooded, it is likely that almost the same number of homeowners have individual assistance claims on file, Goings said.
Grave claims are not restricted to the family of the departed.
“If you have $20,000 left from the FEMA money, for example, you can claim the grave and they can put the body in place,” he said. “Anybody can claim the graves.
“Some had no family, so I claimed them, got the money and got it fixed. It can be anybody.”
Workers are following the casket identification ordinance the Livingston Parish Council enacted in March, which requires an affixed identification on all caskets.
The identification must include the name of the deceased – contained within the casket – as well as the date of the death of the deceased, the name of the funeral establishment, the cemetery name and location and the burial plot location.
The state, meanwhile, is testing a barcode system which would help simplify the identification process in vast burial facilities and during grave disruptions.
“Scan it, and all the information is captured and stored in the cloud,” Goings said. How long the bar code stays attached remains to be seen.”
“It’s the exact same type of system you see in a grocery store, but we didn’t have the money to invest in expensive equipment,” he said. “We’ll make refinements.”
