Truckloads of Chinese dead in need of final resting place

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MIANZHU, China -- With more than 50,000 dead, there is little time for niceties in the disposal of the victims of China's massive earthquake.At the Mianzhu funeral home, bloated corpses in body bags are sprayed with disinfectant and tossed into a truck like sacks of potatoes. The employees are doing their best to be respectful, but they are overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the disaster.All around the earthquake zone, mortuaries are so overcrowded that the dead are often trucked hundreds of miles away. In a few cases, soldiers have dug mass graves to dispose of decaying bodies, for fear that they could spread disease if not buried quickly.The catastrophe has reached such magnitude that it is exhausting the guardians of the dead. "We urgently need more charcoal-filter masks, rubber gloves and disinfecting fluids," says Yang Honggang, director of the Mianzhu funeral home, on the outskirts of one of the worst-hit cities. "The bodies have decayed so badly that it's hard to lift them up to wrap them, and the smell is very strong," he said. Yang was forced to suspend all cremations at his funeral home because the earthquake shattered his tall brick chimney and knocked out his electricity and water supply. "We urgently need a crane to fix the chimney, but all the cranes were sent to the front," he said.Unable to cremate the bodies, all he can do is disinfect them, collect them and send them on to another funeral home, hundreds of miles away.When the latest truckload of bodies is ready to be sent off, an employee lists the contents. "There are 18 bodies, including four unidentified bodies and one left foot," she reports to her colleagues.Rescue workers have taken DNA samples from the nameless bodies and body parts, in the hopes of identifying them later. But the funeral homes can scarcely cope with the deluge of bodies.At a funeral home near the quake-hit city of Deyang, as many as 110 bodies a day are being processed -- almost 10 times the normal number -- and the crematorium is working 24 hours a day to burn them."Some people have lost almost everything, so we waive our normal fees for transportation and cremation, and we give them a free urn for the ashes," said Ren Shigao, the home's director."We have 70 staff working in shifts, around the clock, seven days a week, Shigao said. "We received some supplies from the government, but it's far from enough."The Chinese government has said that it expects the earthquake death toll to climb beyond 50,000. More than 245,000 have been injured, while a further 4.8 million have been left homeless.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)