http://www.newsday.com/ne...1494oct20,0,2937701.story
IN THE MARSH OF CAMERON PARISH, La. - 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 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 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 had
been 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 unearthed 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 dislodged by Rita. Ike was worse - the storm affected coffins containing her mother,
brother-in-law, cousin, niece, three uncles and two aunts.
Dyson's mother's coffin 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 has a team of two employees, volunteer boat pilots and state prisoners to search hundreds of miles of marsh with borrowed equipment. The work is
backbreaking, with heavy coffins weighed down even more by mud in swampy areas teeming with alligators and snakes and the stench of rotting marsh grass.
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, 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.
"It's a slow process," Zeb Johnson said.
The Calcasieu Parish Coroner's Office is footing most of the search and recovery bill, which hasn't been tallied.
