Burial of rotting cadavers starts

TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines — At least a hundred of unclaimed corpses, out of the more than a thousand left rotting in an open field nearly two months after Yolanda, were initially buried in a temporary mass grave at Suhi in Barangay San Isidro of this city yesterday.

The burial will be completed by weekend, said Dr. Sioban Ruddel, representative of the World Health Organization, who provided technical assistance to the government agencies upon request of Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, adding that there was lack of manpower in the processing of the cadavers.

Mayor Alfred Romualdez came to the site at the start of the burial that was done by personnel of the NBI, the DOH, the Philippine Red Cross and the city government. Military and police officers were also there.

Ruddel administered the rebagging of the corpses, before these were buried. NBI personnel also took DNA samples first from the cadavers, put tags on each of these for identification procedures later on.

The burial site was by the roadside, adjacent to pile of the cadavers outside the barangay health center building. A backhoe was used in digging up a 3-foot wide, 40-foot long and four-foot deep hole where the bagged corpses were laid out one beside the other.

“The burial site here is temporary and thus only shallow excavation to enable easy access later when authorities will have to take out a cadaver for identification by relatives,” Ruddel told The Freeman.

NBI medico-legal officer Arnel Bacod, who came from Manila, said DNA samples were taken yesterday from 418 cadavers, while a similar process was also being done on about 400 more, as of press time.

The NBI said that yesterday a total of 146 cadavers have been identified by relatives and were transported for burial at the Holy Cross cemetery at nearby Brgy. Basper.

The city government had earlier bought for P7.5 million a 6,000-square meter lot at Basper to be a permanent burial site for the identified dead of Yolanda, including those temporarily buried at Suhi.

Yesterday’s burial at Suhi gave relief to the affected residents in the area. Evangeline Gallo, 67, whose house was just 30 meters off the stinking pile of cadavers, said she was thankful of what the government did. “This is our Christmas gift for the new year,” she said in the dialect.

Ruddel commented that the complaints of residents were a natural reaction because they were not accustomed to the situation. “Besides they were so stressed out due to the devastation of  Yolanda,” she said, while allaying fears that the corpses may caused an outbreak of diseases in the area. “They died of natural causes and not of diseases,” she added.