Mobile cooling unit used after Ohio county morgue runs out of space
CANTON, Ohio -- Another Ohio county has made use of a mobile cooling unit to store bodies because its morgue ran out of space, in part because of fatal drug overdoses.
The coroner had to bring in a 20-foot cooling trailer over the weekend to store at least four bodies received on Saturday, CBS affiliate WOIO-TV reports.
Investigator Rick Walters says the office was at capacity with eight bodies, then got four more on Saturday and employed the trailer, reports WEWS-TV.
Such temporary morgue arrangements also have been used Ashtabula, Cuyahoga and Summit counties in northeast Ohio.
The coroner in Dayton has said his office sought help from a local funeral home to store bodies amid an increase in overdose deaths.
A spokeswoman said the Ohio Department of Health has several cooling units that local agencies can request to use.
Every day, 91 Americans die from an overdose of opioids, which include prescription painkillers and heroin, CBS News correspondent DeMarco Morgan reported last month.
In one case in Cleveland, Ohio, a man disappeared on the day after Mother’s Day, and police found his body days later in a home on the west side of Cleveland.
“The pandemic is devastating the very fiber of this country. If this were the flu, our county would be under quarantine,” the man’s mother, Camelia Carter, told CBS News.
