Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993 TAG: 9301050240
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
WHAT'S A BODY TO DO? BUDGET SHUTS CREMATORIUM
Here's one group of budget austerity victims who won't be doing any griping: Cadavers used in college classrooms have nowhere to go after this month because the state is closing its crematorium in Richmond.More than two dozen universities and medical schools around Virginia will have to find new ways to dispose of their flesh-and-formaldehyde course aids by Feb. 1. The 20-year-old state crematorium has too many ills to continue functioning, officials said; it belches smoke back into the laboratory and can't muster enough heat to, well, fully do what crematoria do.
"I feel sorry for the schools, because I know it's going to put a burden on them. . . . But our hands are tied; there's no money to fix it," said Wayne Hufner, administrative director of the state medical examiner's office, which operates the crematorium.
The facility's biggest clients - Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk and the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond - already are taking bids from funeral homes to assume the morbid mantle.
"It will just cost us more money," said George Goode, associate professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Eastern Virginia Medical School. Bids from the three local funeral homes equipped with crematoria aren't in yet, Goode said, but he's counting on the cost quadrupling.
The state charges about $25 per cadaver - "just the cost of the natural gas to cremate, I guess," Hufner said. The school sends about 80 bodies a year, so its total cost could go from $2,000 to about $8,000.
But there will be perks. With a funeral home running things, Goode said, "it'll be a hearse rather than vans, three-piece black suits rather than coveralls." Plus, for the rare times when a relative wants the remains handled some way other than mass burial, most funeral homes offer the option of scattering the ashes at sea. "All in all, I think the service is going to be better," Goode said.
Not so for the animal carcasses that used to be destroyed in another incinerator in the same building. The state Department of Agriculture performs post-mortems on about 15,000 pounds of farm animals a month, and its incinerator was shut this past fall for the same reasons as the crematorium.
"We had to make arrangements to have a rendering company pick the carcasses up. It cost us extra money. . . . In fact, they're going up on us," said Paul Friedman, acting assistant state veterinarian.
Before, the carcasses were taken straight from the lab table to the incinerator at no cost. Now the remains have to be specially prepared, packed into barrels and picked up twice a week for $40 a load.
"It's a hardship coming up with the money," Friedman said.
Which is what brought about this problem in the first place. It would cost $160,000 to replace the human crematorium alone, "and right now the money's not available," said D.B. Smith of the state Department of General Services, which oversees the facility.
Smith said the problem came to light in September when state inspectors checked the incinerators because workers complained of smoke leaks. The agriculture unit and another used for burning paper were closed immediately; the crematorium was allowed to phase out because so many institutions around the state were using it.
The unit fires up "at least once or twice a week," Hufner said. Aside from the medical schools, 23 universities - such as Old Dominion University and the College of William and Mary - have anatomy programs that use cadavers and then forward them to the state for disposal.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.