At its worst pandemic moment, São Paulo suspends burials in cemetery for lack of space

1. RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Sunday, March 28th, the metropolis recorded the highest number of burials in its history in a single day: 392, including cremations. Another 381 were performed on Monday, March 29th.

Cachoeirinha was the third cemetery with most burials in the first two months of this year, behind only the cemeteries of Vila Formosa, in the East Zone, and São Luiz, in the South Zone.

According to the Municipal Servants Union, the unit will paralyze the burials in the general court to concentrate all efforts on exhumations, the only way to open space for burials at a time of great demand.

The funeral service of the current administration (Bruno Covas – PSDB) said that only the burials of those who own graves in the area under concession, and children, will continue to be performed.

“The measure is contained in the Funerary Contingency Plan, publicly presented in 2020, and was defined based on logistical criteria based on the number of deaths occurring within 24 h in the city, which is facing pandemic and is in an emergency phase, as determined by the São Paulo Plan,” says the body through a note.

The exhumations will be performed in one block to remove at least 1,056 remains that have been buried for four years. According to the Funeral Service, the procedure is performed every three years for adults’ bodies, and every two years, for children up to 6 years old. The period is set from the burial date.

“But it’s a huge lack of planning,” complains João Batista Gomes, the representative of the gravediggers in the Municipal Servants Union. For him, the São Paulo funeral service was wrong to include Vila Nova Cachoeirinha among the four necropoles that started to perform night burials. “If they knew there was no vacancy, it doesn’t make sense to have included this unit in this schedule,” he says.

Units 1 and 2 of Vila Formosa, the São Luiz cemetery, and the Vila Nova Cachoeirinha cemetery are since last week under extended working hours to cope with the increase in burials caused by the pandemic.

The company Era Técnica Engenharia was contracted, under an exemption from the bidding process, to supply lighting towers to assist the work of gravediggers during the night.

The same company was also contracted to supply school vans adapted for the transportation of bodies between the hospital morgues and the cemeteries. According to the funeral service, the measure seeks to reduce the waiting time of families for burials.

In an interview with the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo on Monday, March 29th, Alexandre Modonezi, the holder of the Subprefectures secretariat, said that the largest city in the country is organized to meet “the increase in demand never seen before” and that there will be no shortage of burial areas.

He mentioned 2 large areas, never used, at the Itaquera cemetery, in the East Zone that would serve as an outlet to relieve the cemeteries in most demand.

The report found that the Perus and Santana cemeteries will absorb the demand from Vila Nova Cachoeirinha until the unit resumes the burials in its general courts.

Modonezi has the final say in decisions, but attorney Pedro Henrique Dias Barbieri has been managing the funeral service in São Paulo for less than two weeks.

Barbieri left the head of the municipal office and became the superintendent of the service in place of Dário José Barreto, appointed by Covas to take over the subprefecture of Santana/Tucuruvi.