Detroit - Too broke to bury their dead

Summary

October 1, 2009: In Detroit, dead bodies are piling up in the morgues as the high unemployment in the city means that many people can no longer afford either burial or cremation for their relatives - and the funds of the county to bury unclaimed dead were depleted in June of 2009. Thus, the bodies pile up in the freezers.

Presumably, some form of mass grave lies in the near future…

See Also

• News: 'I Never Could Have Imagined' - other appalling treatment of corpses

Source

Bibliography

1. Original article

Game and Story Use

• Those fools! Proper disposal of corpses is vital for preventing a zombie menace!
  • Also ghouls and possibly wendigo.
  • Actually, all it takes is a fairly minor breach in storage procedures (or, say, the power getting cut off to a cold store due to lack of maintenance or bill payments) and all sorts of things may be getting a taste for human…
• Also, once you have a pile of anything awaiting disposal, people tend to add stuff to it … what better place to hide a corpse than in a large stockpile of corpses.
  • Probably better that than people start stealing them… maybe …
• Very few cities are equipped to store a large number of corpses, so you can see the work getting subcontracted - an obvious place would be the sort of derelict meat-packing plant you might expect to find in a depopulating city (considering that such places are equipped for - relatively - hygenic handling of dead things and have large cold stores). Now imagine your PCs finding thier way into one of these without knowing what it's about. A meat packing plant, full of human corpses…
  • Also, given the usual degree of competence in local government, such a place could still be ticking over decades after it was first contracted, possibly with very little indication as to what the (probably large) monthly payment is for. In the event of a new broom, some very minor functionary could find themselves with an unexpectedly interesting investigation.
  • Worse still if, following significant reforms, an agent of local government is sent to arrange for the place to be cleared out and closed down … only to find that all of the corpses are gone. Or some of them are gone. Or at least some of all of them …
• This whole thing is the sort of dystopic fun to be expected from cyberpunk.