Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [49]
The pavement is completely covered with crushed roofs of homes. One of the searchers, Scott Prentice, carefully makes his way amid the debris. His progress is slow, steady.
“We can’t search all of these with all these boards,” he says, stepping over a marine’s dress jacket lying in the rubble. A child’s naked doll hangs from a tree; its eyelids close and open. “We could spend weeks right here,” Prentice says, shaking his head, “but we have to move on.” He breathes deeply, seeing if he can catch the smell of a corpse.
The Virginia task force has set up a base camp nearby, in the parking lot of a Rite Aid pharmacy. When we get there, a woman named Sally Slaughter stops by to report a missing person. Slaughter is small and thin. Her worn face is hidden beneath a baseball cap. She works in a nearby motel and is worried that her co-worker Christina Bane is dead.
“I went with some other neighbors to her house this morning, and it was still boarded up,” Slaughter tells one of the searchers. “We broke open a back window and there was a body right there in the kitchen.”
Slaughter knew that Christina Bane and her family didn’t evacuate. “They were scared of leaving their house ’cause of looters,” she tells me. Later, I learn the real reason they’d stayed: Bane’s two sons were disabled, and she didn’t want to go to a shelter where people would stare.
“I don’t want to say they were retarded, exactly,” Slaughter says, “but they were a little slow.”
Anytime a corpse is found, the Virginia task force’s body identification unit has to photograph it, and mark its location for recovery. Right now, there are no places to take the bodies; the local morgues are flooded, and so are the private funeral homes. Eventually FEMA will send in refrigerated trucks to store the dead, but it will take several days for the first ones to arrive.
At the Banes’ house, Sally points to the window she broke open earlier this morning. The house is still. I can smell the bodies. Holding my breath, I press my face up to the rear window, dirty with mud. It takes a few seconds for me to realize what I’m looking at. There’s a man lying in front of me. He’s covered in mud and sediment, trapped amid piles of lumber and insulation. I assume it’s Edgar Bane, Christina’s husband. He’s badly bloated, twisted and swollen like a birthday balloon about to pop. One of his arms is stuck at a right angle. Rigor mortis has set in.
He’s the first storm fatality I’ve come across so far. I’ve seen drowning victims before—in Sri Lanka and elsewhere—but never here in America. I didn’t expect it to make a difference, but it does.
The front door is jammed, blocked by pieces of debris left behind when the water receded. The team begins prying open a window. It doesn’t take them long. As soon as the window opens, the odor pours out. Everyone has to stand back.
Christina Bane is inside. So are Edgar and their two sons, Carl and Edgar Junior. All four are dead. Drowned. Sally Slaughter is crying. She’s the only one. One of the searchers takes out a camera—digital, downloadable—and shoots pictures of the Banes. Click. Click. Click. Click. Another searcher takes out a Magic Marker. On the Banes’ front door he writes V for victims. 4 DEAD.
A FEW BLOCKS from the Banes’ home, the searchers find a body lying on a sidewalk in an empty cul-de-sac. I think it’s a woman; at first, it’s hard to tell. Water wipes away identity, race, even gender. I think she’s African American, but her skin appears white, translucent almost.
Someone has covered her face and part of her body with a dirty bedspread. Her feet and hands stick out.
“Did she drown here?” I ask one of the searchers.
“No,” he tells me. “Apparently, she died in one of these buildings