The city of Harrisburg is looking for a new home for 82 caskets - all of them empty.
The coffins, a major donation to the city by the Batesville Casket Company of Indiana, have been stored for some time at the Southeastern Illinois College Foundation building on Commercial Street, the Alan Miller building. Now, the foundation needs the space, Mayor Valerie Rose Mitchell and Public Properties Superintendent Russell Duncan said on Thursday.
Eventually the caskets are to contain the remains of the 82 people who remain in the private mausoleum within the city’s cemetery.
Originally, city officials believed removing the bodies, placing them into the new caskets and burying the bodies at the cemetery could be a relatively rapid project. However, removing bodies cannot be done rapidly as efforts must be made to contact descendants before court orders can be issued to allow the reburial.
Efforts to contact the descendants have not been highly successful.
So far, only about 10 families have responded to city appeals for descendants to contact the city, Public Properties Superintendent Gerald Mahan told City Council.
He and City Attorney Nina Brown urged any descendants to contact Mahan’s Public Properties office.
Mitchell said she has been looking for a place where the caskets can be stored. So far, there has been little success on that aspect of the project.
However, Mitchell said, she is not certain what buildings may be available to the city for temporary storage.
Duncan said there is a possibility about half of the caskets could be stored in county buildings, but that doesn’t solve the city’s entire storage problem.
Mitchell asked that anyone willing to allow the storage contact her office. The primary criteria for storage is a dry building, she said.
Once all paperwork is completed and court orders are issued, local funeral directors — on a voluntary basis — will be supervising removal of the remains from the vaults at the cemetery. The remains will be placed into the new caskets and services will be conducted during burial at the cemetery.
Mortuary students are expected to participate in the work.
Slow progress
Blasting of lead-based paint from the city’s 200,000-gallon water tank on Mill Street and repainting of the tank is progressing, but not at a speed that is satisfactory to city officials and consulting engineers Brown and Roberts.
The work had been delayed until the end of the school year due to the proximity of East Side School and city officials do not want the work to extend into the school year as a precaution due to the removal of the leaded paint.
An expensive precaution is being taken to protect the surrounding community. The tower is being shrouded during the paint removal. During Thursday’s meeting, council authorized a first payment of $74,880 to Diversified Coatings Limited. Engineer Mike Roberts said the amount primarily is for the shrouding.
Roberts said the concern of the city has been expressed to the firm regarding the speed of the work.
Training site
Council has authorized a new training site for the Harrisburg Fire Department, to be located on Veterans Drive.
Firefighter Rick Mallady, the department’s training officer, said it no longer is feasible to use abandoned structures for training due to the extensive paperwork and high costs imposed by environmental agencies on the city for a house burning.
The new training installation will not have a tax cost. It will be paid by the so-called “foreign fire money” which is a fee paid to Illinois departments by out-of-state insurance companies who sell fire insurance to Illinois residents. The money can only be used by a fire department and training is one of the approved uses.
The city training area will be fenced and will utilize shipping containers as structures, allowing firefighters to simulate a fire in a four-story building as well as various rescue procedures.
