New York City’s coronavirus dead could be temporarily buried on old Cold War missile island

Coronavirus dead across New York could be temporarily buried on the city’s famous Hart Island, where unclaimed and unidentified bodies are buried by prison inmates in mass graves, as morgues across the city continue to overflow and the death toll ticks up.  

Hart Island is ordinarily used to bury unidentified or unclaimed bodies. It was used after the Spanish Flu and has now emerged as a possible mass burial site for coronavirus victims. 

Drone footage taken last week on Thursday – which is the day bodies are buried there every week – by The Hart Island Project shows inmates in hazmat suits digging graves on the island, possibly for victims of the virus which has claimed more than 3,400 lives across New York City.  

In a normal week, 25 bodies are buried there. According to Jason Kersten, a spokesman at the Department of Correction, which oversees the island, that number has risen to 72 since the end of March, when the virus exploded in New York City. 

It comes after public officials sparked panic and disgust by claiming some of the dead would be temporarily buried in public parks.  

That suggestion, made by councilman Mark Levine, has since been dismissed but the question of what to do with the escalating body count remains pertinent. 

Mark Levine, a Manhattan council representative, tweeted on Monday: ‘Trenches will be dug for 10 caskets in a line. It will be done in a dignified, orderly and temporary manner. But it will be tough for NYers to take.’

The comments caused a stir, prompting Levine to clarify his remarks by saying he understood any temporary burials would be carried out on Hart Island rather than public parks.

He added: ‘I have spoken to many folks in City gov’t today, and received unequivocal assurance that there will be *no* burials in NYC Parks. 

‘All have stated clearly that if temporary interment should be needed it will be done on Hart Island.’

The mayor’s spokeswoman, Freddi Goldstein, stressed that the city government was not considering using local parks as cemeteries. But she added that Hart Island, where around one million New Yorkers are already buried in mass graves, may be used ‘for temporary burials, if the need grows’.

Interments of coronavirus fatalities on the island may already have taken place. 

Melinda Hunt, the founder of the Hart Island Project, said drone video footage shot last week appears to show burials of COVID-19 patients who passed away.

She told CBS New York: ‘Within an hour they’ve buried 25 bodies, so it’s a very efficient system of burials.

‘Hart Island has been used during the 1918 flu epidemic. Thousands of New Yorkers were buried there, diphtheria, tuberculosis.’

One former Rikers Island inmate who spent five months working on the island until February this year has also told of the grim operation that goes on there. 

Vincent Mingalone said in a voiceover of the video, found here, said he worked as a team of around seven men who formed a supply chain to move the bodies from a truck to the mass grave every Thursday. 

They were stacked three deep and then covered with sand and soil. 

Mingalone said that he is now worried about whether there will actually be enough inmates willing to do the job. When he was incarcerated, he said no one else volunteered to do the work because they viewed it as ‘ghoulish’ or ‘dirty’ and because it was low paid compared to other prison jobs. 

Since the pandemic erupted, 1,000 inmates have been released from Riker’s Island, leaving fewer people to bury the bodies when they keep piling up. 

‘My concern was, they released a lot of sentenced inmates. So I don’t know if they’re going to get the inmate labor.

‘Even when it was a full house, a lot didn’t volunteer. They thought it was ghoulish, they thought it was a dirty job.

‘It was one of the lower paying jobs compared to maybe working the car wash or cleaning or any of the other outside clearance jobs. A lot of people didn’t want that job.

‘Now it’s going to be slim pickings because a lot of inmates have all been released because of this pandemic,’ he said.  

The island is home to the city’s potter’s field, a cemetery for people with no next of kin or whose families cannot arrange funerals.

Over the last 160 years Hart Island has been a Union Civil War prisoner-of-war camp, a psychiatric institution, tuberculosis sanatorium and a potter’s field burial site.

Since 1861 more than a million people have been buried there, with trucks still arriving at the site twice a week from morgues across New York. 

One there inmates from Rikers Island are paid 50c an hour to act as pallbearers and bury the dead. 

The dead are interred in trenches, with babies placed in coffins, which are stacked in groups of 1,000, measuring five coffins deep and usually in 20 rows.

Adults are placed in larger pine boxes arranged according to size and stacked in sections of 150, measuring three coffins deep in two rows. 

Since the first decade of the 21st century there are fewer than 1,500 burials a year at Hart Island. 

Hunt, who has documented Hart Island, added that help would be needed from the military when it came time to reunite families with the deceased.

Mayor Bill de Blasio himself spoke of the possibility of temporary burials ‘to tide us over until the end of the crisis. 

‘We are not at that point,’ he told reporters, before refusing to give any more details.

On Monday morning, nine bodies were seen being loaded into trucks outside Wyckoff Hospital in Brooklyn.

Several undertakers interviewed said they were struggling to deal with New York state’s coronavirus death toll of more than 500 a day.

Between Friday and Saturday, a high of 630 deaths were recorded.

Ken Brewster, owner of Crowe’s Funeral Homes in Queens, said: ‘The majority of funeral homes do not have refrigeration or [have] limited refrigeration.

‘If you don’t have the space…you need those trucks,’ added Brewster, whose small business has been bombarded with requests for funeral services for COVID-19 patients over the past week.

Pat Marmo manages five funeral homes across the city.

He is finding it difficult to cope with the stress generated by influx of bodies, particularly because he himself just lost a cousin and close friend to the pandemic.

Marmo said: ‘The hospitals are pushing [us]. They want the people picked up [as quickly as possible] and the funeral homes don’t have the facilities to handle these bodies.’

Marmo estimates that his homes are currently dealing with three times more bodies that normal and that burials will last well into next month.

‘It’s almost like 9/11, going on for days and days and days,’ he said, referring to the worst terror strikes on US soil back on September 11, 2001, that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Monday that the number of deaths across New York state had flattened out since Saturday’s high, below 600 a day.

He suggested the state may be at the peak of its pandemic, but extended stay-at-home measures until April 29, saying now was not the time to end social distancing.