Dr. Patricia Bixel

A lot of those were on the island.

Bodies were collected within all of this debris and all these areas.

Initially, they decided they were going to try and take them out to sea, basically do burials at sea.

And so they would load the bodies on barges, weight them, and take them out.

But unfortunately, they came back on the tide.

They came back up onto the island on the tide.

So that wasn't going to work.

The other thing that I think it's good to note is that people realized immediately that

The sanitation issues were terribly threatening to the health of the population, so you had to do something about it.

And the decision was made that, in fact, they were going to burn the bodies.

So they started these immense funeral pyres on the beach.

And this had the, I don't want to say double advantage, I guess, of being a reasonable way to dispose of the corpses so that they couldn't make anyone sick.

And you burned a lot of the debris that way.

And so for at least a month after the storm, funeral pyres were burning on the beaches.

The smell was horrific.

The work of gathering the corpses and taking them to the pyres was horrific.

As recovery goes on, of course, you're discovering bodies for months, and eventually morgues were set up in some of the larger warehouses and brick buildings that were more in the business district and down on the stream.

The businessmen and most of the leadership of the city survived.

They formed the Central Relief Committee, was the name of it, the CRC.

And they immediately assigned every person a committee, and there was a public health, and there was a transportation, and there was power, and there was getting the services back, getting the water mains going.