Funeral Homes Bear the Strain

As dozens of firefighters stop in front of the casket and mourn their lost friend, the phone in the offices of Thomas F. Dalton Funeral Home quietly rings.

Another family, with another missing loved one, is on the line. It’s the fifth call the staff has taken Wednesday.

“It’s incredibly busy for everyone right now,” said funeral home official Beth Dalton-Costello. “And none of us knows how to handle it.”

From casket makers to funeral parlors, the grief industry is overwhelmed with business--and preparing for an unexpected financial boost--because of the World Trade Center tragedy.

It comes at a time of great change for the funeral industry. Many of the family-owned mortuaries that have served the New York area for decades have been acquired by big national chains in recent years as part of an industry consolidation.

Never have these local businesses been asked to handle so many events. Industry experts estimate there will be thousands of funerals and memorials in the Tri-State area alone in the next six weeks.

Some funeral directors are worried that they may not be up to the task and have recruited staff from outside the area. Frank E. Campbell Mortuary in Manhattan has networked with scores of other firms, and jointly they are flying in 1,500 workers from other parts of the country to help ease the load.

“I’m trying to prepare myself,” said Timothy Dalton, co-owner of Thomas F. Dalton Funeral Homes. “I’ve got to be on the top of my game.”

Morticians also are worried about the strain on their employees, who will be dealing with the grief of families that, in many cases, will be overwhelming.

“This is all unchartered ground,” said Phillip Gutterman, co-director of Gutterman’s Inc. “There was TWA 800 but this is so much bigger.”

The 1996 crash of the TWA flight near Long Island killed 230 people. It was the last massive loss of life confronted by New York medical examiners and funeral directors, and it was considered “a nightmare,” according to several local morticians.

The World Trade Center disaster is more than 20 times that size in number of victims, and every service outlet designed to help the survivors is feeling the burden.

One public agency assigned to help families of the missing and the dead is showing signs of strain. The phone number at the burials desk at the city health department was continually busy for several days this week. On Wednesday, the phone was reported out of order.

In addition, bureaucratic delays could prevent some families of victims from getting badly needed money from insurance policies for months--possibly even years.

For many families, the ceremonies will be held without the remains of their loved one.

It will take months for coroners to find and identify the estimated 5,000 people who were trapped in the towers and issue a death certificate allowing relatives to cash insurance policies.

And the bills keep piling up.

A typical memorial service costs $1,000 to $3,000, while an average funeral can run from $6,000 to $10,000, say officials with the National Funeral Directors Assn., the largest trade organization for the $15-billion-a-year industry.

“This can’t hurt this industry financially,” said Jennifer Childe, an equity analyst with Bear Stearns. “It’s definitely going to help.”

Several of the larger mortuaries in New York City are offering free services to families of the more than 300 firefighters, police officers and other emergency service workers who died in the towers.

The Frank E. Campbell Mortuary and the John Krtil Funeral Home are offering free funerals for all city emergency workers, while Gutterman’s, New York’s largest family-owned Jewish funeral home, is offering free memorial services for all victims.

“It’s impossible for all of the other thousands of funerals to be handled for free, though,” said Ron Hast, publisher of the trade magazine Mortuary Management. “It would cost too much for these companies. There’s so many people that we could still be having services after this Christmas.”

Scheduling has also become a concern. From neighborhoods in Staten Island and Queens to more rural commuter towns in New Jersey and Connecticut, many victims lived within blocks of one another.

In the small town of Fair Haven, N.J., a bucolic suburban hamlet set 50 miles south of the World Trade Center, the staff at Church of the Nativity recently gathered with other local religious leaders to coordinate their services.

Four people are missing here, and 15 are either dead or missing from nearby towns. Many of the victims attended the same church. And because of the close-knit nature of these towns--where the population is less than 6,000--both clergy and funeral directors are acutely aware that none of the memorial services can conflict.

After all, everyone in town is expected to attend.

“Some families will have to wait and they will not be able to get the time they want,” said James Nolan of Nolan Taylor Howe Funeral Home in New York. “It will require some tact.”

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Times staff writer Jill Leovy in New York contributed to this report.