Bone Remains: Cold Cases in Forensic Anthropology

14. Hurricane Isaac

93 14. Hurricane Isaac A ugust 29, 2012. They called it a “slow-moving” storm, and they said it was “big.” Packing winds of less than one hundred miles per hour and crawling along like a baby just learning how to slide across the floor, Hurricane Isaac approached southern Louisiana. Seven years to the day almost after Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans and surrounding areas. Unlike Katrina, where authorities called for evacuation and many stayed, people left town on the run when the weathermen said Isaac was heading straight for New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Though those two cities would see fallen trees, power loss, and moderate flooding damage, things were different in St. John and Plaquemines parishes, and surrounding parishes. Forecasters certainly were correct about the speed of the storm. Isaac rolled into Louisiana and simply sat down, not moving, building and building a storm surge, pouring and pouring rain over some of the southern parishes. By the time it was over, it had ushered in a fourteen-foot storm surge that undermined levees and destroyed or severely damaged almost sixty thousand homes. Loss of community was devastating. Part of that sense of lost community was the disruption of Promised Land, English Turn, and Bertrandville cemeteries on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish. After the storm, authorities witnessed an eerie sight when they approached those cemeteries, two of which had existed since the 1800s and are still in use today as final resting places for loved ones in the local community. Highway 39, which follows the river, was blocked not only by houses that had floated from their foundations but also by concrete vaults, tombs, and caskets that had been lifted from their moorings and tossed along the highway. Some of the tombs were still intact while others were broken open with waterlogged caskets resting inside. Still other caskets were gone 94 Bone Remains completely and scattered human remains dotted the road and the grass between the vaults. An email late one afternoon from Henri Yenni, with Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH), came as no surprise. For years, many of us in Louisiana who deal with the dead had been trying to jump-start a state disaster team that could handle smaller disasters, certainly not one the size of Katrina, but any that might result in minimum impact in terms of lost lives or cemetery disruption. Henri and I discussed the possibility of assistance from the FACES Laboratory with the damage created by Isaac, and he put me in touch with Arbie Goings. Arbie and I had worked together on various cemetery recovery projects through the national disaster teams. DHH had hired him to manage the damage done by Isaac in Plaquemines cemeteries. Discussions with Arbie led to a roundtable meeting with my research associates in the laboratory. We outlined the pros and cons of such assistance as we might give to DHH and finally concluded that the recovery and identification process were manageable. I knew all of the team had to be on board or the logistics might be difficult. The fall semester at LSU had begun, and two of us had teaching obligations. We decided to rotate various team members in and out of the work cycle and take graduate students with us as needed to round out the team. For both the seasoned graduate students and those new ones who had just entered our program (eleven in all), they would receive the experience of a lifetime. Requirements for participation in the burial identification process included written evidence that all of the new students had their series of shots that are required by the lab to touch human remains. These included Hepatitis A and B and tetanus. Those who had simply started their series of shots would only be allowed to act as scribes. All wanted to go, and all wanted to take part. Their participation proved essential to the successful completion of the effort. We began to organize the tools we would need to carry with us. They included our typical portable backpacks that we usually Hurricane Isaac 95 take into wooded areas, but they also included our measurement tools such as calipers and collapsible osteometric boards. We had been informed that air-conditioned tents with floors would be waiting for us upon arrival. In the tents would be large tables made of sawhorses and sheets...