on a boat

4 kind of arduous days of relaxation.
arduous cause i would have prefferred to be working.
but it was very nice to spend the time with my mom, and she pampered the hell out of me.

and for the most part any work or active thught i did was...not active. subconscious.
i'm sure my brain was doing something on the matter but, hell if i was aware of it.

the only very relevent thing that happened was that-
my mom was on the boat for a nursing meeting. on forensic nursing.
and the last speaker they had was the coroner during the aftermath of the hurricane.
so-i got to sit in on that discussion.

first off, the lecturer was not the official coroner.
both the orleans and st. bernard parish coroners were missing in action. they turned up days later having had to swim from their homes and offices and no phones or power and all that,
he was organizing emergency medical examiner or something, ambulances.
and people knew he had previously been a coroner so they asked him to step up.
i forgot to write down his name,..

but. 'he' got thrown right into the mix. the dead bodies floating and stuck in attics and homes and the murders and deaths in the super dome and convention center, all of that.
he was responsible for organizing and identifying the bodies.

and since he was speaking to a bunch of nurses who are quite accustomed to gore, he did not refrain from graphic imagery.
he talked about how hard it was to ID a waterlogged body where the skin may have fallen off and scavenging animals had eaten off their fingers and the medical and dental records were all flooded...not an easy task.

well, first they had to find the bodies. the coast guard and wildlife and fisheries and private boat-owners were performing their own search and rescues--this is what we all heard about. governm,ent was way too slow and the only reason most people were saved was cause local people took action--but they would drop these bodies off on the elevated portion of freeway the morgue and emergency people were occupying and they had no idea where they found them. not that it mattered cause bodies floated or when they were alive they swam to higher ground and neighbors hoses and stuff.
but after all the water went down he had the task of going through all the houses to find and account for bodies.

the marks his men made are still on almost every building in the city.
one slash when they enter, one slash when they exit. the top quarter held the date, the left the team ID, the bottom the number of victims found, and the right any hazards.
at first if the door was locked and there was no answer they couldn't go in (red tape)

anywya- you've seen some of the pictures of house interiors i've sent. imagine them with fresh mud and wet and stench. he said every house smelt like dead bodies cause of the meat left in the fridge or whatever. they had corpse dogs, but they weren't all very good. there were some that were invaluable. he told anecdotes about someone knowing their family member had to be in the house and insisting and his men had checked 3 times, but they sent the dog in and in 25 seconds he founf the body. and that dog would follow behind other dogs and find bodies they missed.

this was kind of intense: more often than not bodies were found in the attic.
when they saw the attic stairs open he called that 'the death trap'
sometimes bodies would be tangled in the chords of the ladder as they tried to swim out of the attic when the water flooded all the way up the attic roof.
they learned, when looking for bodies, to look around the vents. people would tend to hang on to the vent cause it was the last place that had air as the water rose in their attics.

how gorey avision is that?

he said families were furious but he often refused to let them see the bodies of their family members.
oh-and he got in trouble for praying over bodies.
and the whole organizing and cleaning and IDing bodies was a very arduous task.
not only all the toxic shite, and difficulty with no finger prints or tattoos on bodies, and then having to
literally excavate the dental records out of mush cause LSU and Charity hospital stored their records in the basement, go figure, and the xrays would com eup blank and they'd have to take photographs of the manilla folder wehre the image was left imprinted,
well, evetually all but 246 of the 13,200 missing bodies were found. and i think there are a little over 100 bodies unidentified/unclaimed and there is still some fear over what they'll do with em cause previously in our history we've done mass graves, but he insists that won't happen.

anthro department helped by identifying the age bracket of victims.
cause of death more often than not was drowning or dehydration.
also heart attacks and deprivation of medicine.
only 18 homicides despite rumors,
but it is true that the suicide rate in NO is up 300%.

also-transfer trauma.
people, especially the elderly, rescued off rooves, bused or flown to dallas or oklahoma or somewhere where they didn't know anyonw, waking up to strangers asking them if they know their name and where they live and...trauma.
people died from it.

and 141 died in hospitals. (i'm gonna interview one of the refugees at my dad's house who was working in a hospital in NO during the storm and 5 days after till they got rescued.
52 dies in nursing homes, 35 are in court over wrongful death-euthenasia investigation.

the rescue people are having bad post traumatic stress now. alcoholism and domestic abuse.
yep.

what else did he say?
oh, he was pissed off at the media's coverage of the deaths. exaggerating and even posing images (he caught one international group posing a maniquin under a tarp as a deade body)
and they had to declair the area over the temp morgue a no fly zone and put up camofluage cause the media was so desperate to get a body count.
and he was pissed off at "hollywood"'s intervention. they just got in the way.

also-"we are an armed community"
EVERYone had guns.
that's something to think about.