ASHLAND – Ashland County will make do with the mortuary storage options it has for now.
Following several weeks of unclear contingency plans as dead body storage needs exceeded storage capabilities, Ashland emergency management association, health department, coroner’s office, hospital and local funeral homes met Feb. 16 for a mass fatality preparedness meeting.
The meeting served more as a means to share information and concerns than to set procedures.
It remains unclear at this time how storage availability will be communicated in real time or how the county can speed up delays with death certificate signing.
Issue #1: Storage
If Ashland County experienced a mass casualty event there would be nowhere within the county’s boundaries to store the bodies once the two morgue spaces and funeral home resources are exhausted.
Coroner’s office investigator Beth Jackenheimer said the main objective for the meeting was to make all agencies aware of the extra storage options available through their Richland County counterpart.
Ashland County has an informal agreement with the Richland County coroner’s office to handle overflow.
“The other agencies know now that we do have extra space available should there be an issue,” Jackenheimer said. “You just have to make a couple phone calls.”
Robert Ball, chief investigator for the Richland County coroner’s office, said the space Ashland County also has access to is a warehouse that can store up to approximately 250 bodies.
Richland County gained access to the warehouse, which is secured with an alarm system, through a private entity at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, around June 2020, and will continue to have access indefinitely as long as the private entity is the owner, Ball said.
To Ball’s knowledge, the warehouse has not been widely used yet. The private entity nor location of the warehouse were disclosed to ensure the site remains secure and the general public does not try to access it, he said.
Issue #2: Communication
Building a line of communication between first responders and the morgue or other storage options is the challenge, EMA director Mark Rafeld said. But addressing that is the plan.
“How it’s going to be communicated out to, like, EMS units in the field, those kinds of details aren’t fully worked out yet,” Rafeld said. “But the ideas for them (are) to certainly put in place some kind of structure so that everyone has access to the availability of storage.”
Issue #3: Signing death certificates quickly
Delays with doctors signing death certificates was another topic of discussion, Rafeld said.
Before cremation and burial processes can start, funeral homes must have a signed death certificate from a doctor. This winter, funeral home directors said the slow turnaround of death certificates by doctors has been the largest obstacle in keeping their morgue spaces clear.
“One of the steps we talked about (during the meeting) was making the doctors aware of it,” Rafeld said of how delays impact storage, noting state law requires physicians to sign death certificates within 48 hours, or by the appropriate coroner or medical examiner. He said some doctors, particularly young doctors, might not be aware of the statute.
“If we get that fixed, it fixes a very large portion of the rest of the problem,” Rafeld said.
The death certificate delays were discussed, but no decisions were made about how to speed up the process, Rafeld said.
Alex Roberts, president of Roberts Funeral Home, has seen delays first-hand and thinks the solution may lie with the state, not local authorities.
“I did not attend the meeting on Wednesday but one of our funeral directors, Top Cropp, was in attendance,” Roberts wrote to Ashland Source Feb. 18. “He said that there were several good ideas discussed regarding all of the issues, but that no decisions were made regarding having the doctors sign death certificates in a more timely manner.
“Doctors are licensed by and answer to the State of Ohio Medical Board so it seems that local officials don’t have the authority to press the physicians on signing death certificates.”
What’s next?
Wednesday’s meeting was discussion, not action-based.
“There’s not a timeline,” Roberts said regarding when protocols will be established.
The next step, he said, is for all the agencies to take the ideas back to their teams to formulate plans that make sense for them.
Representatives from University Hospitals Samaritan Medical Center — emergency preparedness and community outreach manager Steve Carroll and manager of communications and development Kathleen Whitmer — declined to comment about the outcomes of Wednesday’s meeting, specifically regarding whether the hospital is taking actions to address storage capacity issues and death certificate delays.
While storage space has been a challenge this winter, part of the county’s solution involves waiting it out.
Both Rafeld and Jackenheimer anticipate that storage will become more manageable as the county passes colder months, when more deaths typically occur.
Following Wednesday’s meeting, there are no imminent plans to ask for funding for more morgue space, Rafeld said, but that is always an option for the future.
