Did FEMA Help Send Refrigerated Trucks to New York City for Morgue Storage in Spring 2020?
Did FEMA Help Send Refrigerated Trucks to New York City for Morgue Storage in Spring 2020?
We don't know.
Remember the refrigerated trailers (“set pieces”) in The New York City Pandemic Show of Spring 2020?
Most of the containers were dispatched by city agencies, but media also reported that FEMA was sending 85 trucks.
Re-reading those reports last year, I wondered if the FEMA trucks were sent and were actually used to hold decedents.1 I submitted a records request to the agency one year ago today, asking for the number of human bodies loaded into FEMA trucks each day in New York City, between March 15, 2020 and June 30, 2020.
The agency responded within a few weeks and said it had no records responsive to my request:
“We conducted a search of FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery (ORR) Responsive Directorate and ORR Logistics Management Directorate for documents responsive to your request. FEMA may have supplied refrigerated storage trucks at the request of the region, but we did not have a contract for mortuary storage services in NYC. As a result, no responsive records were located.”
It’s a bit unusual for a federal agency to express uncertainty about whether supplies were supplied. Does “may have supplied” mean FEMA isn’t sure if refrigerated storage trucks were sent? Did they not want to say because I didn’t ask about the refrigerated storage trucks apart from human bodies loaded onto those trucks? It’s hard to tell.
More important is FEMA saying there was no contract for mortuary storage services in New York City. Admittedly, this could mean there’s no record of services provided and doesn’t mean that services weren’t provided, but the most charitable and straightforward interpretation is "FEMA didn’t send any trucks that were used to store bodies.”
An April 2, 2020 story from ABC News said FEMA had requested 85 trucks, 100,000 body bags, and mortuary services from the Department of Defense.
The Defense Department has been tasked with providing 85 refrigerated trucks and 100,000 body bags to assist state health agencies with mortuary affairs due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The requests, made by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), come as the White House revealed this week that as many as 240,000 Americans could die from the virus.
…
"The Department of Defense and the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) have a longstanding arrangement with FEMA to procure key commodities from DLA's industrial partners during crisis response operations," said Lt. Col. Mike Andrews, Pentagon spokesperson, in a statement. "DLA is currently responding to FEMA's prudent planning efforts for 100,000 pouches to address mortuary contingencies on behalf of state health agencies."
But it's not just equipment that DOD is providing to assist with mortuary affairs, it's personnel, too.
Earlier this week, FEMA requested that a DOD mortuary affairs support team deploy to New York state, according to Vice Director of Operations for the Joint Staff Maj. Gen. Jeff Taliaferro. That team arrived in New York on Wednesday, and a second mortuary affairs support team is expected to be deploy elsewhere in the United States, a U.S. official told ABC News.
A FEMA memo dated July 6, 2020 also suggests the agency assisted with trucks but did not send their own trucks: “As New York City faces the potential for significant casualties that could overwhelm current capacity, FEMA has facilitated the deployment of refrigerated trucks to handle the deceased, if necessary (p. 3).”2
I submitted a new request and referenced the memo:
June 16, 2023 at 10:05 a.m. (U.S. Central)
Good day.
This is a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
A FEMA memo dated July 6, 2020 says, “As New York City faces the potential for significant casualties that could overwhelmed current capacity, FEMA has facilitated the deployment of refrigerated trucks to handle the deceased if necessary.” (p. 3) https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-07/fema_covid-bp_mass-casualty-management.pdf
I seek records that confirm
1) the number of trucks that were deployed,
2) who owned the trucks,
3) the model and make of the trucks,
4) cargo manifests for the trucks,
5) routes of the trucks.
The bullets on page 3 of the memo denote how the trucks might be used. What I’m looking for are records that confirm the dispatch to New York City and how they were actually used.
Another news story indicates that the Department of Defense provided the trucks: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pentagon-asked-provide-85-refrigerated-trucks-100k-body/story?id=69940347
Please provide any communications between DoD and FEMA regarding that dispatch, including memos and emails.
Regards,
Jessica Hockett
The request remains open and unfulfilled after a nearly a year of waiting. Readers can review a PDF file of the communications between me and FEMA agents and draw their own conclusions about the reasons it is taking so long.
My other records requests to FEMA have been processed in a reasonable timeframe (e.g., the May 2023 request shown above, COVID-19 funeral assistance data for New York City), so it’s hard to blame the delay on FOIA office operations. Granted, the request is complex and involves another federal agency, which can delay a records search.
In the meantime, I’ve gone as far as speculating that DOD trucks could have brought bodies into or out of New York City. That may sound crazy, but The New York Times reported in April 2020 that bodies were being taken out of the city to Vermont and Pennsylvania to relieve “overwhelmed” funeral homes.
The drop in autopsies conducted on deaths occurring at home - and sharp rise in “autopsy - unknown” during the event - also raises questions about how bodies were managed (and by whom). There’s also the sudden addition of “probable deaths” to the COVID death toll, unexplained processing of 11,000 deaths in three days by the medical examiner’s office, and dearth of videos, pictures, or personal testimonies about how hospitals handled the cataclysmic toll.
Suffice to say, without basic proof that 27,000 extra people died in eleven weeks very little is “off the table” when it comes to possibilities, including fraud.
I asked FEMA again this morning for a status update on my June 2023 request and hope to hear from them soon.
UPDATE: 5/29/24, 10:53 am (U.S. central)
The FEMA government information specialist responded to my request for an update and said I will receive a response by June 26, 2024.
UPDATE 6/5/24: I received responsive records from FEMA today and will share soon.
UPDATE 6/25/24: Article about the records I received
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is a taxpayer-funded federal agency overseen by the Department of Homeland Security. Every American should want a detailed breakdown of how all FEMA resources were used in New York City during the weeks of the spring 2020 disaster.
There may be an earlier version of this memo, but the language and verb tense of this statement in July 6, 2020 is unusual given official data which show the mass-casualty event had already occurred and daily all-cause deaths were back to baseline.
This is front-facing science.
If there were trucks filled with bodies...there should be records of it, and a lot of people talking about the experience of it. You can't get people not to talk about 9/11. However it happened, the physical reality of buildings collapsing is hard to argue against.
I think you are still on the right path with your unanswered FOIAs. See if you can find some members of the military's "body disposal teams" who will talk to you.