Huge super morgue for NYC dead opens in Brooklyn with bodies stored in freezer trucks in Sunset Park as city's funeral services overflow

New York City has opened a 'disaster morgue' in Brooklyn, using refrigerated trucks in Sunset Park to store bodies as the city's morgues struggle to copy during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The solution is being seen as longer-term, and is designed to ease the pressure on funeral directors who have become overwhelmed, with the number of deaths in New York City now over 14,000, with a further 5,300 probable deaths.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examinar said this week that the morgue is located on Brooklyn's 39th Street Pier, where over 50 trucks are parked.

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The Brooklyn 'disaster morgue' on sunset park pier, pictured on May 6 with the statue of liberty looming behind the trucks through the fog

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Hospital personnel are pictured behind a barricade as they move a body onto a refrigerated overflow trailer outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center on May 7

A spokesperson for the Mayor's office said that many of the trucks are currently empty, but needed to be parked somewhere.

Not all the bodies kept in the trucks will be victims of the coronavirus, the spokesperson added.

The city has proven to be the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, experiencing at least one-fifth of the country's more than 71,000 total fatalities.

With the deaths occurring in a relatively short space of time, funeral homes' ability to get on top of the number of funerals and cremations needed has been severely strained, as has their capacity to store bodies beforehand.

According to CNN, funeral homes have been turning down cremations because they have been unable to store bodies, and have been placing them in refrigerated trailers.

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A hearse arrives at the sunset park temporary morgue, where 50 refrigerated trucks are currently parked. Reportedly, not all the trucks are full

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The temporary morgue in Brooklyn, pictured with a back-drop of the Manhattan skyline

Michael Lanotte, executive director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association, said the trucks would ease the pressure on the city's funeral industry.

'The additional morgue operating hours will also help funeral directors by providing them with evening hours for transfers, since they spend the vast majority of the daytime hours conducting funerals, making arrangements and answering calls from families seeking their services,' Lanotte said.

The morgue will reportedly be open until 10:30 p.m. each day.

Earlier in the crisis, city official announced that potter's field for the poor and unclaimed on Hart Island, the jail system's public burial ground, would be used to bury victims of the coronavirus.

In an attempt to ease public fears over mass burials, Mayor Bill de Blasio responded on twitter, saying: 'There will be no mass burials on Hart Island. Everything will be individual and every body will be treated with dignity.'

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Workers wearing personal protective equipment bury bodies in a trench on Hart Island in the Bronx borough of New York, April 9

On March 29, Dailymail.com reported that dozens of hospitals around the city were using refrigerated trucks as makeshift morgues to deal with the crisis.

The last time that New York City deployed a fleet of makeshift morgues outside hospitals was in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

The city’s medical examiner’s office needed the refrigerated morgues to store the body parts found in the rubble of the World Trade Center.  

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A temporary morgue using refrigerated trucks is set up outside of the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

The city's desperate struggle to keep with the coronavirus deaths was brought to attention last week when police discovered around 100 bodies in two rental trucks outside a Brooklyn funeral home.

Authorities found two unrefrigerated U-Haul box trucks being used to store the bodies outside of Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Flatlands after neighbors filmed body bags being dragged into them in recent days.

There were as many as 50 corpses being stored in each truck, according to ABC News, as the facility struggled to keep up with the overwhelming surge of bodies due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Police found the bodies in various stages of decomposition.

The owner told city officials that its freezer had stopped working and they were forced to use the trucks as storage while bodies awaited burial or cremation.

'For weeks already, there have been trucks constantly outside unloading bodies. You could smell the death,' Jay Fredo told New York Daily News. 'Some of them have been dropped. I know it's a pandemic, but this is crazy. It's sick.'

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A casket is moved outside the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn, on April 30. Almost 100 bodies were found in non-refrigerated trucks outside of the funeral home

No criminal charges were brought but the home was cited for failing to control the odors.

The facility was able to obtain a larger, refrigerated truck later in the day, the official said, and workers suited up in protective gear could be seen in the afternoon transferring bodies.

'I saw 15 bodies in the U-Haul box truck stacked up on one another, and more in the other,' one officer told the New York Daily News. 'They stored them right out on the street.'

A member of staff told ABC that there were a further 30 to 40 bodies inside and some were being kept on the floor.

'This funeral home is over-capacitated with human remains and that is true,' said Dr. David Penepent, a funeral director who teaches at SUNY Canton and was brought in by the state to help.

'He got overwhelmed with the number of remains that he had and he didn't know what to do and I'm here to assist him in this operation.'