FEMA Records Confirm It Sent Refrigerated Trailers to New York City in Spring 2020 But Suggest that Most Weren't Used as Mobile Morgues
The trucks sent from D.C. may have been more theatrical than practical
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) finally provided records in response to my year-old attempt to confirm whether the agency sent refrigerated trucks to New York City in spring 2020 for use as mobile morgues in the weeks immediately following “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”
In this article, I use the records I obtained and other information to address
the number of trailers FEMA reports sending New York City
who requested the trailers and why
who owned the trailers
where the trailers were sent from
whether and how the trailers were used
whether the trailers were needed
PDFs of the documents I received earlier this month are appended.
Did FEMA send refrigerated trailers to New York City?
Yes, they did.1
A final report provided in response to my second FOIA request shows 85 trailers arrived at Ichan Stadium on Randalls Island between March 30 and April 10, 2020. Figure 1 shows the number timing of these arrivals for each day.
Figure 1
It’s curious that no trailers arrived on Wednesday, April 8th, but I have no explanation for why that was the case.
Who requested the trailers and why?
Jennifer Wacha, Deputy Director of the New York State Office of Emergency Management, submitted a mission assignment request for direct federal assistance to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on March 21, 2020 - the day after Government Andrew Cuomo issued a stay home order.2
The statement of work from the Resource Request Form (RRF) follows:
In support of New York State request, as directed by and in coordination with FEMA, Health & Human Services (HHS) will deploy Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) medical response teams, personnel, and equipment to augment State and local medical response resources.
NDMS [National Disaster Medical System] team capabilities include the following:
Primary and acute care, mass casualties triage, initial resuscitation and stabilization, advanced life support, and preparing the sick or injured for evacuation
Veterinary medical services in suppmt of ESF #11 for service and companion animals
Mortuary assistance to recover, identify, and process deceased victims
Mass casualty decontamination; medical triage following a nuclear biological, and/or chemical incidents.
Teams are composed of non-Federal volunteers who are placed on intermittent Federal appointments to facilitate activation, when necessary. When activated, NDMS response team members are Federalized employees of the HHS. Teams are normally deployed for 10 to 14 days.
FEMA logistical support needed: Teams may require some level of base operating support (food, shelter, laundry.etc.).
The comment section of the RRF shows the sequence of events after the RRF was submitted - including the intent to move refrigerated trailers (a.k.a., reefers) “in support of the anticipated surge”.
Approval came March 25, 2020, the same day Congress passed the CARES Act.
Which logistics company was contracted for the job and where did the trucks/trailers originate?
Florida-based Magellan Transport Logistics, Inc. was contracted to bring the trailers to New York City, a fact covered by news media and trumpeted by the company at the time.3
Per the Bills of Lading (BOL), the vehicles originated at FEMA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. and were requested on the March 25th approval day, which was also the day a DHS official reportedly said New York City morgues were nearing capacity.4 5
Additional shipping information on the BOL documents (image below) mentions drivers picking up and delivering freight from origin to destination, which seems to imply something was put inside the trailers and brought to New York.
Most likely the trailers themselves were considered freight. Each one could have been carrying basic materials for building shelves, body bags, or other relevant supplies, but none of the records I was given say anything about freight inside of the trailers.
Were the FEMA trailers used?
The Final Report for all 85 trailers shows only 22 were dispatched to or near one of the city’s 60 hospitals.6 Two were sent to the Javits Center, one of which was not decontaminated because it wasn’t used as a mobile morgue.7 Another trailer is classified CITY TRANSPORTED and was not used as a mobile morgue.
Table 1: FEMA Trailers Dispatched from Ichan Stadium to Hospitals & Other Sites, Sorted by Date of Dispatch
Seven hospitals received two trailers on different dates (usually within a week), leaving 16 unique hospital recipients, shown below in Table 2.
Table 2: FEMA Trailers Dispatched from Ichan Stadium to Hospitals & Other Sites, Sorted by Name of Dispatch Site
Three trailers were located on a street. One address is close to Lenox Hill Hospital and the other near NY Presbyterian Queens. The third address (50-01 Main in Flushing, Queens) doesn’t appear to be located near a hospital.8
The trailers that were not dispatched remained “in yard” at Ichan. Some had shelving and some did not, but the records FEMA provided don’t show if or how those trailers were used. None was decontaminated, which suggests they sat empty or were used for purposes that didn’t require decontamination.
By mid-to-late May 2020, the non-dispatched trailers were returned, presumably to FEMA headquarters.9
Were the trailers sent to hospital used as morgues?
Since the final report regarding the trailer “movements” specifies that two of dispatched trailers were NOT USED FOR MORGUES, I infer that the rest were indeed used to store at least one body.
I also infer that hospitals which received two trailers may have filled or come close to filling one trailer; therefore, a second trailer was dispatched. FEMA did not provide records showing the number of bodies loaded into each trailer, but full-sized trailers hold roughly 50 decedents, unless shelving is used to double capacity.
If all 22 trailers dispatched to/near 16 hospitals were loaded with at least 50 decedents apiece, that’s 1,100 decedents — around 5% of the total number hospital deaths that reportedly occurred between mid-March and end of May 2020.
Were the FEMA Trailers even needed?
I question whether the FEMA trailers were needed at all, simply because there’s no proof that that 21,000+ people died in New York City hospitals in eleven weeks.
That said, hospital morgues are not high-capacity. Even slight increases from what is normal or typical could trigger some kind of emergency response or additional resources.10
Moreover, although officials and media made much ado about morgue trailers at NYC hospitals in these weeks, the presence of a trailer from the medical examiner’s office isn’t especially unusual. Last year, a doctor at one of the public hospitals messaged me to say that one such trailer is often stationed at a loading dock - and was at that very moment. Bodies that aren’t picked up from hospitals and brought to a funeral home have to depart the hospital somehow.
It’s also important to note that the FEMA trailers were not the only containers deployed during New York City’s eleven-week mass casualty event. Some of the so-called “refrigerator trucks” were locally - not federally - sourced.
A report published by the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) makes the distinction clear:11
NYCEM acquired BCPs [Body Collection Points] to provide hospitals with the additional space needed to hold an excess number of decedents. At the surge’s apex, NYCEM deployed 230 53-foot BCPs—145 locally sourced and 85 federally sourced—which hospitals used to increase their morgue capacities.
Unfortunately, the report isn’t clear about the total number of bodies placed into the storage units and provides no context for how many units are usually stationed at hospitals.
So What?
Based on the records FEMA supplied to me, it appears most of the trailers the agency sent to New York City in late March and early April 2020 went largely unused, were requested on the basis of anticipated (versus demonstrated) need, and served theatrical purposes rather than practical ones.
Much like with the FEMA COVID-19 Funeral Assistance data, the records for refrigerated trailers sent to New York City leave me with numbers that don’t substantiate the magnitude of the spring 2020 death event.
Documents FEMA provided to me on June 5, 2024:
At least they did on paper. Recall that FEMA staff told me last year that the agency “may have supplied refrigerated storage trucks at the request of the region.”
For information on Mission Assignment requests/Task Orders (MATOs), see https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/MA_Policy_aug172018.pdf
I don’t know much about Magellan but if this 2018 tweet is any indication, it appears to be a successful and well-regarded company in good standing with Florida legislators.
The March 25, 2020 POLITICO article conveys that city officials were not concerned about running out of morgue space: “For now, city officials do not seem especially alarmed. Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokesperson for the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, said concerns about morgue capacity may be unfounded. OCME’s morgues can store up to 900 bodies across all five boroughs, she said.”
March 25, 2020 was also the day The New York Times published the “Apocalypse at Elmhurst Hospital” article and accompanying video featuring Dr. Colleen Smith.
Sources vary as to how many hospitals are in New York City. I use 60 here but the true number could be a few more or a few less.
New York state’s (flawed) COVID-19 hospitalization dataset shows zero COVID-19 deaths at the medical center that was set up inside of the Javits Center. An April 23, 2020 article in Military Times reported a veteran service member’s COVID-19 death had occurred at the center on April 19 while a patient at Javits. Regardless, it doesn’t appear that trailer designated and decontaminated as a mobile morgue at Javits was ever full of decedents. The graph below shows occupancy peaked at 50%.
Readers can correct me if I missed it.
Typically, “retrograde date” means the date a shipment is returned to the point of origin.
A 2008 NYC OCME planning guide defines a mass casualty event as “any event having yielded, or with the potential to yield, 10 or more fatalities; any situation in which there are more human bodies or human remains to be recovered and examined than can be handled routinely by OCME resources; any situation in which there are remains contaminated by chemical, biological or radiological agents; nn incident or other special circumstances requiring a multi-agency response in support of OCME operations; and or an incident involving a retracted or complex remains recovery operation.” (p. 6)
I’ve reviewed this report previously and have a number of concerns about statements made therein that are beyond the scope of the current article but critical to the broader question of whether the daily all-cause death curve and underlying curves are fraudulent or manipulated.
Great reporting & evidence. Traveling Nurses brought to NYC could likely confirm, but likely signed NDA’s. Allegiance to none by design. Would love to see agreements, especially w/Elmhurst.
Were the hospitals that got the trailers at max capacity during those times? And what defines “capacity” at a hospital during spring 2020? For example, if a hospital decommissions half their beds and then fills the available (50% of) beds is that hospital at max capacity? We have conflicting intel on hospital capacity at NYC hospitals. Maybe the doctors who were “overwhelmed” in the “war zones” were simply on overwhelmed floors of an otherwise empty hospital?