Unearthed: Dozens of remains still unidentified nearly three years after Hurricane Ida damaged cemeteries
(WVUE) - Dozens of caskets remain displaced and unidentified in Plaquemines and lower Jefferson parishes two and a half years after Hurricane Ida damaged cemeteries in southeast Louisiana.
Now, families of the deceased want to know why it’s taking so long to get their loved ones’ remains back to their final resting places.
Eugene Trufant, a lifelong resident of Ironton, a small town in Plaquemines Parish, knows firsthand the power and destruction Hurricane Ida left behind on August 29, 2021.
“Oh it was rough,” he said. “When I came down here, I seen all them caskets all over… it was a mess.”
The small private cemetery near his home where all of his family is buried was destroyed.
The storm’s wrath unearthed 282 remains in Southeast Louisiana, according to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office Cemetery Response Task Force.
“Took about a year for them to get everything rolling. Taking them and identifying all the bodies and everything,” Trufant said.
While Trufant said the recovery effort overall has dragged on, his family’s cemetery is finally back together.
It was a task that took nearly two years to finish, but the Trufant Family Estate cemetery has new tombs bolted to a new concrete foundation.
It’s a different story for Trufant’s neighbor, Pearl Sylve. The community cemetery in Ironton where her entire family is buried is still incomplete.
“I have a sister and a niece. I don’t know who else in my family that’s not there. But I know they’re not there,” said Sylve. “They should have found her or something.”
Temporary storage in Ironton along the highway holds the displaced and unidentified remains from that community cemetery.
“That there is tearing a lot of people up,” said Trufant, pointing at the storage containers. “To come and see their loved ones still in them trailers…”
The state’s Cemetery Task Force said about 40 bodies remain unidentified in the Ironton community. The remains are housed inside two trucks until they can be identified at the state level and reinterred.
Ironton is not the only area dealing with damaged cemeteries.
In lower Jefferson Parish, the remains of more than a dozen people are still unidentified from the Lafitte-Barataria area. They’re locked up in another truck, under an overpass in a gated government lot until they can be identified, 18 miles away from where they were laid to rest.
Why is it taking so long to identify the remains?
In Louisiana, restoring grave sites is the responsibility of the state’s Cemetery Response Task Force, which was created in 2018 and is the only one of its kind in the country. It’s made up of a team of only three people — two anthropologists and a funeral director.
“It’s strange to think that there wasn’t a state-level entity like the task force then,” said Ryan Seidemann, Ph.D., Chair of the Cemetery Task Force. “The simply bureaucratic complexity of dealing with FEMA and with all of these remains with these large-scale disasters just wasn’t something that occurred and needed to be dealt with on a statewide level until we hit those 2016 floods (in Baton Rouge).”
That severe flooding event in Baton Rouge in 2016 destroyed properties, including cemeteries. Seidemann said it took seven years to complete the work of identifying remains and reinternment.
Dr. Seidemann said before the task force was created, restoring the state’s cemeteries after natural disasters required the state to file a lawsuit to get a court’s authority to DNA test and manage cemetery remains.
Now, Louisiana law allows the task force to do the work that he describes as tedious, expensive, and time-consuming.
“FEMA is the funding mechanism for all the cemetery repairs and FEMA does not fund DNA analysis of previously deceased people,” he said. “But even if they did, the likelihood that we could get any type of usable data is slim. We would have to know family members. They would have to provide samples of their own. And we’d have to get viable samples coming out of the remains—which is also difficult.”
Seidemann said the Cemetery Task Force and its board are looking at ways to work with state lawmakers to try to find alternative DNA analyses and ways to fund them.
“It’s a way to ease a burden on a family that’s already struggling because their house just got flooded out,” said Ginesse Listi, Ph.D., Director of LSU’s Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services (FACES) Lab.
Dr. Listi said because DNA analysis can cost hundreds, if not, thousands of dollars, the FACES Lab volunteers its services and resources to help with identifying the remains.
“We record as much information as we can from those remains. So if there’s any clothing present, what is the clothing? We take pictures. We take notes,” she said. “Then we look at the remains and can we say anything about whether they were male or female? Can we say how tall they were?”
She said the process can be challenging.
“If you’re dealing with, let’s say, 40 sets of remains, and 35 of them are over the age of 70 and all were African American or white individuals, and all were buried in a suit. Then you’re dealing with the memory of the loved ones and it’s like, ‘Well I think they were buried in a black suit as opposed to a blue suit,’ And so you have to kind of whittle it down,” she explained.
Dr. Listi said it’s important details like these that the Cemetery Task Force relies on to properly identify the bodies. Also, visits to these communities are often necessary, but with only three people doing the leg work for the entire state—it’s overwhelming.
“So the answer to ‘why does it take so long?” Is because it takes this long to do it right and from our perspective there is just no other option,” said Dr. Seidemann. “It’s just not something that we can or will rush. And so it takes time.”
Back in Ironton, time is all the residents have. But the wait takes a toll.
“I would be glad when they come on and do the rest of it that needs to be done,” said Sylve. “Because it’s just been too long.”
When Hurricane Laura slammed into Southwest Louisiana in 2020, the Cemetery Task Force received about 3,000 claims of impacted graves. Not all of those remains were displaced or needed to be reidentified.
Fast forward to today, and Seidemann said while the work is complete, 12 individuals are listed as “definitively unidentified and likely unidentifiable using current technology.” He said arrangements with Cameron Parish government officials will make space in the public cemetery there for the reinternment process.
Dr. Seidemann said it could take until the end of 2024 to identify the rest of the remains in Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes and repair the cemeteries in Ironton and Lafitte-Barataria.
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