BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. Sept. 5 -- The makeshift morgue in this leveled town of 8,000 people is a parking lot on a narrow two-lane road that runs along some rusty train tracks. Six refrigerated trailers are lined up in neat parallel behind a chain-link fence.
For a week now Norma Stiglet, the county coroner, a grandmotherly woman with white hair and spectacles, has been identifying the decaying corpses of lifelong friends and neighbors who tried unsuccessfully to ride out Hurricane Katrina.
"It's almost indescribable, because I was born and raised with these people," Stiglet said Sunday, sitting by the trailers in a rickety folding chair. "You want to help them. But what can a coroner do?"
The official death toll in Mississippi is 150. The last official count in Hancock County, of which Bay St. Louis is part, stood at just 36, but that could be ludicrously deceptive. One law enforcement officer estimated it is more likely to be between 600 and 800. The residents are "in for a shock," he said. The reason the number is so low is that the state only counts bodies that have been recovered and positively identified.
For days, Stiglet was alone and besieged as she did her work. Finally, some organization is beginning to take shape: the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Mortuary Assistance Teams, or DMORTs, have begun to arrive with additional coroners. FEMA has coordinated with local law enforcement, and search-and-rescue units from around the country are conducting a grid search of the entire town, house by house.
After so many days, some of the discoveries are hideous. Stiglet refuses to talk about such matters. "We don't discuss that," she said.
But other officials describe the conditions frankly. Bodies have bloated, and heat, water and insects hasten their decomposition. A living person has an immune system with which to kill bacteria, but a deceased body has no protection. The bacteria population explodes. Some of the bodies are so badly decomposed they don't have fingerprints. Others are damaged or torn apart. "It's not at all pretty," said James Johnson, emergency operations coordinator. "They're finding pieces. If you find an arm, do you call it a body? It's pretty grisly."
What keeps people working in such circumstances? "In my opinion it's determination and love of your fellow man," Stiglet said.
Born and raised in the area, Stiglet has been the coroner for Hancock County since she was first elected in 1990, and must watch people she knows suffer the terrible uncertainty of loved ones unaccounted for. "It's hard, very hard on everyone, but it's harder on them than on me. And we just don't hardly have much info for people."
Sometimes, Stiglet cannot confirm the identity of the corpses. The density of the wreckage, the intensity of the heat, and the depth of the water and mud have combined to make identification a gruesome task. She tries to match a body with an address where it was found, or an object. "We're using the house numbers where they were found," she said. "We just never thought we'd see water like that."
The morgue sits on Central Avenue in the lot of the defunct Alcan Cable Co. Around it, nothing is standing. Just next door is the Garden of Memory Cemetery, where tombstones poke up through ground made sodden by floods. Farther down, four mangled houses lie pancaked on the railroad tracks. They were pushed there by a storm surge that was 25 feet high, and made the oak trees look like bushes. The huge, twisting, roundhouse punch Katrina delivered to the Bay St. Louis-Waveland area -- the two towns, separated imperceptibly, are located within a few miles of each other and linked by Central Avenue -- is evident in the collapsed roofs and the trees that lie split open, their bark wrenched nearly 360 degrees. Some of the roofs are marked in code with orange paint. The code indicates searchers found a body there.
The recovery effort was at first haphazard, conducted by volunteers and local law enforcement. When officials from FEMA arrived there were chain-of-command issues and confusion over Mississippi state laws for body recovery and identification. Also, communications in Bay St. Louis-Waveland are spotty. Cell phones do not work and radio traffic is jammed. "Running up and down the street on a four-wheeler, that's communication," Stiglet said.
