These are images that have shocked America. At the bottom of a dozen-meter-long trench bulldozed on Hart Island in New York, a small truck brings wooden coffins to a few workers in protective gear. They place them next to about twenty coffins already stacked on top of each other and which gradually disappear under shovels of black earth ... It is a huge mass grave. The scene, unimaginable a few weeks ago, has become the symbol of a metropolis bruised and brought to its knees by the coronavirus.
"Who would think it was happening in New York?" Wonders Jeff Sult, an employee of the MLB chain, unemployed for a month. "I had heard of this public cemetery but I never imagined seeing it here! In 2020! "
The funeral services of the metropolis overwhelmed
But, as of April 15, the coronavirus has killed more than 8,200 people in the city, which remains the epicenter of the pandemic here. The funeral services of the metropolis are completely overwhelmed. The morgues are full, and refrigerated support trucks are parked in the parking lots of hospitals.
Crematoriums can no longer meet demand. Admittedly, the situation is also serious in Detroit for example, where we have seen hospital rooms filled with corpses in their body bags, some even seated on armchairs. But New Yorkers thought it could never happen at home ...
VIDEO. In New York, mass graves to bury the "without family"
"I don't know which is more shocking," says Jennifer Lewis, a Midwestern American who has lived in New York for over 30 years, "The field hospital in Central Park? Nurses forced to put on garbage bags in the absence of protective clothing? Or now this mass grave? "
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Normally, 25 people who are destitute or whose bodies have not been claimed by their families are buried each week on the island. Now it's around 25 a day. Before the pandemic, families had 30 days to claim the deceased in one of the town's morgues. This deadline fell to 15 days. Beyond that, the body will be buried on Hart Island. But if families want to recover the remains, it will be possible, even if it is buried in the mass grave, said the municipality, recalling that the names of the dead are written in large letters on the pine coffins.
"Isle of Tears" near the Bronx
"The Isle of Tears," as the New York Post called it, is located in the East River, a stone's throw from the Bronx. Purchased by the city in 1868, with an area of 50 hectares, it was first used as a training ground for Union soldiers during the civil war, then as a penitentiary for the "Confederate" enemies prisoners and even German soldiers during the Second World War, in red brick buildings now overgrown.
Tuberculosis and yellow fever patients were isolated there, before becoming essentially the largest public cemetery in the country. Over a million New Yorkers in total were buried there, often in 150-person mass graves, soldiers, the destitute, the homeless, stillborn children and those New Yorkers who die alone and do not die. will never be claimed by their relatives ... In 1918, many victims of the Spanish flu had been buried there, and in the 1980s, victims of AIDS.
PODCAST. Spanish flu: how did the world cope with the pandemic 100 years ago?
Until recently, detainees from nearby Rikers Island prison buried the dead on the island once a week for $ 40. But it is now a Brooklyn construction company that is responsible for the trenches and burials. "It's a bit special, it's true, conceded Joseph Pizirusso, the boss of the box, to the NY Post. But we really needed this job, we were all unemployed! "
A little south, on the island of Randalls Island, dozens of refrigerated trucks ready to be called in reinforcement are parked in the parking lot of the Icahn stadium. It was in this same stadium that Pelé made his football debut in the United States for the New York Cosmos team, exactly 45 years ago. Another era…
