Legacy MattersIn Louisiana, Search Goes On for Lost Coffins.
Displacements of more than 1,500 bodies occurred in Louisiana from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Some were also displaced in Texas and Mississippi. Hundreds remain unidentified, officials say. Louisiana estimates the cost of retrieving lost coffins will be about $4 million.
Mr. Mudge, a retired councilman and former deputy, inherited recovery duty in his parish three days after Katrina. He was traveling through flood waters by airboat when he noticed coffins floating in the streets. "The storm broke apart everything," Mr. Mudge says. "Everything came out."
Over the last three years, his wife, Barbara, a 62-year-old parish government secretary, has compiled meticulous notes of the clues in each find. They quickly discovered many people are buried without any notation in the coffins of who they were.
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Some coffins were sent to a temporary morgue an hour away, where experts looked for medical identification bracelets, name tags, dental records and performed X-rays. They kept records of mementos placed with the bodies, such as Budweiser and banana-liquor bottles, fishing poles, letters, baseball caps, jewelry and in one case an Aretha Franklin cassette tape.
In February 2006, all the bodies were sent back to Plaquemines Parish with reports of the findings in each coffin. Mrs. Mudge went to work. She conducted dozens of interviews with people who had lost relatives, as well as funeral-home directors and grave diggers -- compiling descriptions and combing through reports for clues.
Mr. Mudge retrieved two identical coffins adorned with a pink rose design, one on top of a levee and another in the woods. The local mortician opened the first coffin, and spotted a hot pink bingo marker in the exact spot described by Ms. St. Ann. "They asked me if I wanted to keep it," Ms. St. Ann says. "I told them to leave that marker with her just in case something like this happens again." Her brother's body hasn't been found.