Bobbing Coffins, Other Flood Perils Plague N. Carolina

Coast guardsmen plied the 20-foot flood waters of eastern North Carolina on Friday, trying to snag scores of coffins that popped out of the ground after Hurricane Floyd.

A team of funeral home directors will begin identifying the wayward coffins today to help get them back to what were supposed to be their final resting places.

“We’re doing this to ensure that all the caskets are identified so that we can notify their loved ones,” said Coast Guard Lt. Scott Bates.

The Coast Guard crews spent the day in Princeville, across the Tar River from Tarboro, trying to round up as many as 100 airtight coffins that were forced from the ground by the river’s flood waters.

Too heavy to pull onto boats, the coffins were either towed to shore or tied to trees as Coast Guard crews recorded their locations. All appeared to be sealed and intact.

Across the flood zone, North Carolina residents are keeping emergency room doctors busy with cuts, bites, stings, diarrhea and nausea as they clean up.

People are fumbling with chain saws, bees and mosquitoes are swarming, and flood waters are teeming with contaminants.

“We have been quite busy, day and night,” Cathy Dover, an emergency physician at Lenoir County Memorial Hospital, said Friday.

Nash General Hospital doctors have treated two snakebites. At Pitt County Memorial Hospital, doctors are seeing more people stung by bees as they try to clear away brush and other debris. Other patients have cut or punctured themselves with chain saws and other things and have gotten tetanus shots to ward off infection.

But so far, there have been no outbreaks of infectious disease.