County Buys Mobile Morgues

County Buys Mobile Morgues

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County Buys Mobile Morgues
Federal Disaster Preparedness Grant to Buy Mobile Morgues

POSTED: 6:22 pm PDT October 27, 2009
UPDATED: 9:46 am PDT October 28, 2009

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- As the county prepares for emergency disasters or pandemics like the H1N1, they're also preparing for mass fatalities. The county received a nearly $100,000 federal grant for disaster preparedness. About $20,000 of that will go to purchasing two mobile morgue units in the case of mass casualties.

The trailers are about 25 feet long and could store 20 bodies each. In a disaster, the mobile units would

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[edit on 10/29/2009 by semperfortis]

Kern County is getting ready for an emergency. Any guesses of what they are expecting. Swine Flu, Martial Law, General Violence? The County probably does not want to overwelm the abulance service. They probably do not want to encourage people of driving their dead to the morgue, as it might temp them to break the car pool laws. Is your town getting prepared?

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[edit on 10/29/2009 by semperfortis]

A few years ago, there was a deadly heat wave here in Chicago that killed over 500 people. That overwhelmed the County Morgue. They had to bring in refrigerated trucks to store all the bodies until autopsies could be conducted on them.

It doesn't take much to overwhelm the system. It's pretty much geared up for the average number of deaths. That average might fluctuate quite a bit, but it's usually got some reliable upper limit. Until you get some unusual situation.

H1N1 is only one possible cause of increased mortality. All sorts of things could also cause it - heat wave, cold snap, earthquake, flood, terror attack, and so on. My guess is that all this talk of H1N1 got people to thinking, and they're doing something that would ease the burden in case of a serious emergency.

Certainly two morgues that can handle a total of 40 bodies isn't going to make a huge dent in any major disaster. But it could give the county a bit more room to handle a less disastrous increase in deaths.

I'm thinking that if they were expecting huge numbers of fatalities, they'd invest in body bags or coffins or something, and skip the autopsies. If you've got thousands of bodies, you aren't going to have time for autopsies. You'll be lucky if you can get them all buried.

Storage capacity of 40 people? In the county the size of Kern? Most hospitals have the capacity of say 30-40 tops (Ours which is a MAJOR teaching hospital has at most 30)

Its really for show more than anything else. If its truly full blown, what they have not talked about is how to deal with all those casulties. Open pits and burn them is the most likely scenario.

Edit to add: remember the heat wave in paris a few years back. what 10000 people died and the storage capacity of the entire area was overwhelmed.

[edit on 10/28/09 by FredT]

I was worried by this post until I saw it was only two vehicles with a small capacity in relative terms to a pandemic. If they started buying fleets of these, and we started seeing them everywhere, I would become very alarmed.

(nice python reference, he's not dead yet)

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[edit on 10/29/2009 by semperfortis]