On April 28, the city opened its long-term freezer storage facility on Brooklyn pier, which can hold at least 1,500 bodies. (The city declined to give a precise capacity).
“That was a real breakthrough,” said Jenna Mandel-Ricci, the co-author of a Greater New York Hospital Association report on fatal accident management, which documented the lessons learned during the crisis. “I hope we don’t need it, but knowing it’s there and knowing it’s part of the framework that’s been built is incredibly reassuring.”
At the height of the crisis, federal disaster workers and the New York National Guard helped process and store thousands of bodies in Disaster Morgue 4, as the marine terminal was called. At the end of May, there were a total of 2,137 bodies on the pier – 1,468 in long-term storage and 669 in refrigerated trailers, the medical examiner’s office said.
As of December 4, the city’s facility at the sea terminal still held 529 bodies in long-term storage and 40 in refrigerated trailers. (The Wall Street Journal first reported that bodies were still being held at the facility.)
The city has not set a time limit on how long a body can remain there, as long as there are discussions with the family for a final resting place. The service is free, said Dr. Sampson.
She said those held in long-term storage there in December were a combination of Covid-19 and non-Covid fatalities, arriving at the terminal since May. The site, she said, eases pressure on her office’s regular morgues, which can hold 900 corpses, and also provides a central place for funeral directors to retrieve remains.
Burials on Hart Island haven’t stopped, however: 2,225 adults have been buried in the city cemetery there this year, the most in decades, according to the city’s Department of Correction. Now funerals are taking place at the request of the family or because the bodies went unidentified or unclaimed after an investigation of about two months, the medical examiner said.