FEMA Sends Texas 14 Mobile Morgues As Coronavirus Death Counts Rise
The Sunbelt states buckling under COVID-19 have started making preparations for the worst to come: They’re ordering extra morgues. The mobile, refrigerated morgue units are supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency or on the private market, giving hospitals and local public health departments extra capacity to store the dead.
Local news reports from Texas and Arizona say that officials and hospital chains have begun in recent weeks to order extra, mobile morgues. The reasons differ, but they either come as a response to death rates starting to overwhelm storage capacity for the dead or as local officials anticipate and prepare for the same.
FEMA told TPM that it is sending 14 “mortuary support units” to Texas in response to a July 11 request from the state’s department of emergency management. The units, a FEMA spokesperson said, “are in transit and should arrive at the state by early next week.”
Local officials in Texas have been agitating for the mobile morgues as death counts rise.
“I am now having to order additional body bags and morgue trailers. People have to understand how real it is,” Barbara Canales, Judge of Texas’s Nueces County, told a Corpus Christi TV station last week.
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