COVID in L.A.: They're Running Out of Pine for Coffins

[babylonsister]

COVID in L.A.: They’re Running Out of Pine for Coffins
City of Corpses
Overloaded ICUs are feeding overloaded funeral homes, where things are somehow even crazier than ever seemed possible.
Jason McGahan
Updated Dec. 29, 2020 10:45AM ET / Published Dec. 29, 2020 4:54AM ET


LOS ANGELES—On Saturday, a 52-foot refrigerated trailer was delivered to Continental Funeral Homes on East Beverly Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Alongside it sits a 20-foot trailer that Magda Maldonado began renting in the summer, but that no longer provides the room the 58-year-old funeral director needs for the volume of dead arriving from one day to the next.

“No funeral home around here has a container large enough to accommodate the number of people who are dying from COVID,” she told the Daily Beast.

Maldonado’s experience, and those of the people she works with, paint a picture of a death industry that is overloaded and overwhelmed. Of bodies piling up in area crematoriums, casket makers facing a shortage of supplies, and gravediggers struggling to keep up with equipment breakdowns.

While slammed funeral homes and deluges of dead have marked the coronavirus pandemic across the country, the people who power the industry here say they really are at the breaking point.

“Wood is getting scarce, especially pine, which is the most inexpensive,” said Auriel ‘Guero’ Suarez, owner of the Universal Caskets Manufacturing Corporation in East Los Angeles. “In 52 years in the business, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

more...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/los-angeles-covid-19-crisis-revealed-by-52-foot-trailer-of-death-at-funeral-home?ref=home

[Botany]

1. Trump, "So much winning."

“No funeral home around here has a container large enough to accommodate the number of people who are dying from COVID,”

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[UpInArms]

3. Reminds me of a verse from a Lou reed song

Because when the smack begins to flow
I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And all the politicians making crazy sounds
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds

[Initech]

2. This is getting to be so damn scary.