“We were sort of stacking up bodies,” one medical examiner says. “We had all these initial bodies and then more bodies were coming in.”
Overwhelmed by the number of bodies to autopsy and thrown into a political debate over precisely how many lives the storm has claimed, many medical examiners in the hardest-hit parts of Florida are facing extraordinary challenges in accounting for all of the storm’s victims.
“We were sort of stacking up bodies,” Vega said. “We had all these initial bodies and then more bodies were coming in.” Within days of taking over operations in Port Charlotte, Vega and his colleagues — local staff, along with reinforcements sent from elsewhere in Florida under a state-run mutual-aid system called the Florida Emergency Mortuary Operations Response System — were processing as many as 42 bodies in a facility designed to hold just a half-dozen or so at a time.
“The hurricane adds all the logistical problems of the lack of resources and utilities that you normally would count on,” Vega said.
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