When the corpses are found they are taken to the nearest dead house and are carefully washed. They are then laid out in rows to await identification. Cards are pinned to their breasts as soon as they are identified, and their names will be marked on the headboards at the graves.
Wholesale Funerals.
There were many rude funerals in the upper part of the town. The coffins were conveyed to the cemeteries in wagons, each one carrying two, three or more.
At Long View Cemetery and at one or two other points long trenches have been dug to receive the coffins. The trenches are only about three feet deep, it being thought unnecessary to bury deeper, as almost all the bodies will be removed by friends. Nearly three hundred bodies were buried thus to-day.
There will be no public ceremony, no funeral dirge, and but few weeping mourners. The people are too much impressed with the necessity of immediate and constant work to think of personal grief.
The twenty-six bodies taken to the hose house in Minersville were buried shortly after ten o'clock yesterday morning. Of the twenty-six, thirteen were identified. Eight women, a baby and four men were buried without having been identified.
All day yesterday men were engaged in burying the dead. They ran short of coffins, and in order to dispose of the rapidly decomposing bodies they built rough boxes out of the floating lumber that was caught. In this way they buried temporarily over fifty bodies in the cemetery just above the town.
Putrefaction of dead bodies threatens the health of the whole region. Now that the waters are fast shrinking back from the horrid work of their own doing and are uncovering thousands of putrid and ill-smelling corpses the fearful danger of pestilence is espied, stalking in the wake of more violent destruction.
The air is already reeking with infectious filth, and the alarm is widespread among the desolated and overwrought population.
Cremation Best.