It had been raining all night and the next day, something creepy shocked the people.
A creepy scene indeed! Sixty-five coffins surfaced and scattered after the apartment-type graves in the public cemetery of La Carlota City in Negros Occidental province collapsed due to heavy rains brought by the low pressure area and Southwest Monsoon on Monday morning.
Hermilo Gabotero, the cemetery’s caretaker’s son, said that they were shocked to see the graves, layered one above another, collapsed following the heavy rains the past night.
Some of the graves were decades old while there were some which were only ‘occupied’ for three weeks which made the coffins peek-a-boo.
The local health office has already been advised of the incident to make necessary measures to avoid air and water contamination or pose any health risk due to the exposure of the corpses.
A research shows that contamination of water supplies by unburied bodies, burial sites, or temporary storage sites may result in the spread of gastroenteritis from normal intestinal contents. According to a PAHO article on the Infectious Disease Risks From Dead Bodies Following Natural Disasters: To those in close contact with the dead, such as rescue workers, there is a health risk from chronic infectious diseases which those killed may have been suffering from and which spread by direct contact, including hepatitis B and hepatitis C, HIV, enteric intestinal pathogens, tuberculosis, cholera and others.
The substances cadaverine and putrescine are produced during the decomposition of animal (including human) bodies, and both give off a foul odor.They are toxic if massive doses are ingested (acute oral toxicity of 2 g per kg of body weight of pure putrescine in rats, a larger dose for cadaverine); there are no effects at all for a tenth of that dose.While figures for humans are not available, allometric scaling, which takes into account body surface area, is often used to compare doses in different animals, with useful results. Scaling 2g/kg from rats suggests that a 60 kg (132 lb) person would be significantly affected by 27 grams (0.95 oz) of pure putrescine. For comparison the similar substance spermine, found in semen, is over 3 times as toxic.
There is little evidence of microbiological contamination of groundwater from burial. Where dead bodies have contaminated water supplies, gastroenteritis has been the most notable problem, although communities will rarely use a water supply where they know it to be contaminated by dead bodies. Microorganisms involved in the decay process (putrefaction) are not pathogenic.