By: Michael O’Farrell – Investigations Editor.
THIS is the grim reality Ireland faces in the coming weeks as the coronavirus crisis heads towards an expected peak.
Row after row of body-bag-sized shelves, hastily constructed beneath a tent from scaffolding and bare construction wood.
When stacked four high, the mortuary – set up in the car park of Dublin’s Royal Hospital in Kilmainham – has a capacity of approximately 480.
An identical mortuary is also understood to be planned for Limerick. In the northeast, meanwhile, Meath County Council has asked Navan firm Tallon Mortuary Specialists to prepare a ‘mass fatality facility’ in the town.
Under local authority emergency plans councils are responsible for mortuary facilities in the event of mass fatality events.
Plans for the Navan facility Plans to pronounce deaths outside hospitals indicate that it will be able to scale up to cater for 450 bodies if necessary.
These facilities are required as mortuary places throughout the country are nowhere near capable of dealing with expected deaths.
At normal times Dublin’s hospitals and the capital’s City Morgue have a combined capacity of approximately 100 – and would routinely become crowded during a seasonal flu outbreak.
In addition to the facilities built this week, the authorities in Dublin and Cork also have further capacity via temporary ‘mortuary domes’ which they have purchased from UK firm Flexmort at a cost of hundreds of thousands of euro.
Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB) holds a Flexmort mortuary dome at its training facility in Marino.
The dome is allocated for use by Dublin and Wicklow under the HSE’s emergency plan for the region.
It is understood any deceased person requiring a post-mortem will be transferred here pending examination.
In Cork, emergency services invested €125,000 in a Flexmort mobile morgue 18 months ago and have since carried out test deployments at Collins Barracks. Housed in a refrigerated container, the system can be deployed from the back of a truck by the Defence Forces and can be inflated in minutes.
Its body-racking system can store 56 bodies. The dome also includes two standalone refrigerated containers that increase body storage capacity to almost 100.
However, it is likely that refrigerated trucking containers will also have to be utilised – a measure that has been listed in emergency plans.
For example, the Mayo County Council plan envisages ‘that in the event of mass amounts of casualties, temporary mortuaries may be used in the format of refrigeration trailers for storage of large amounts of bodies’.
Such measures are frequently used in disaster zones involving mass casualties. In addition, local authorities have compiled lists of suitable buildings which may have a capacity ‘for the storage of bodies and post-mortems’.
Hospitals too have routine emergency arrangements to deal with a surge in fatalities arriving at Accident and Emergency departments by ambulance.
For example, when a major incident is triggered, Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown has plans in place to pronounce death at the front door when an ambulance arrives before temporarily placing victims in body bags in the hospital’s physio room.
