These bacteria are highly toxic, and require decontamination of anything they contact.
Burial will be impossible in New Orleans proper. Indeed, a formal burial of any kind will likely be impossible. Storing these bodies in refrigerated trucks may be possible, but if there is a cholera outbreak, the state health commissioner may order a mass burial somewhere upstate.
We've never seen anything like this before in the United States.
Yes we have -- just not outside a Civil War battlefield. Side note: identifying bodies will be difficult or impossible. I think a lot of folks will never get positive word that their friends and family are dead, rather than "missing."
I've heard the trucks aren't there yet.
Yes, we have.
More than 6,000 dead, probably many more - estimates range up at least as high as 8,000, but record-keeping was poor and many were simply never found.
They wound up burning the bodies on the beach because when they towed them out to sea they drifted back in.
That is a full sized barge. Full of bodies.
Not the same, but what did they do with all the bodies in the great flu epidemic of -- not sure of the year -- 1918 or so? My mother told me her mother described the coffins stacked in the streets (in Boston) waiting for the city wagons to pick them up -- daily.