B.C. heat wave leads to backlog at funeral homes, mortuaries

Vancouver -

In June before the record heat wave, Zane Green’s funeral home and mortuary were at a low capacity.

But when the temperature spiked, so did business.

“We went full tilt,” said Green, owner of Ancient Burials, Funerals and Preplanning. “Kind of going from zero to 100 all at one time.”

A tragic consequence of the record-breaking heat wave in B.C. is the number of people who died suddenly and unexpectedly in a matter of days.

Green said that while his funeral home can still offer services for families upon request, the morgue is slammed.

“There were delays in transportation...of retrieval of a person, and increases in volumes at that time,” said Green.

The BC Coroners Service said there were 808 deaths between June 25 and July 1, but those are still preliminary numbers and could change.

In a statement to CTV News a spokesperson for the coroner said, "At this time we’re unable to conclusively say how many and which of the reported deaths were due to the extreme heat."

But they added, “This is an unprecedented number of deaths within a very short timeframe and far more than the province would normally experience."

Green said before the work of preparing a body can begin, funeral home workers have to wait for coroners’ investigations to finish. That entire process can take up to six weeks, he explained, and when a sudden spike happens like this one, it can cause a backlog.

“There is current high volumes in place, capacity is being used right now to shelter people until a time that this natural disaster is taken care of,” Green said.

A sudden event like this heat wave can cause gaps to show, and Green said there is a lot of work that needs to be done in the funeral and death-care infrastructure.

“There’s only one crematorium in Vancouver because the city only allows crematoriums in cemeteries,” he said, and there’s only one cemetery in the city.

“The emergency preparedness plans that we have in place that are based off the populations that we had five years ago, they’re not going to work now,” said Green. “Our population is continuously growing.”

He also hopes that people will recognize "last responders."

“Those people go unnoticed,” said Green. “We always acknowledge our first responders but in death care, we’re invisible. We weren’t even considered essential services until a few months after COVID had come into place.”