Tens of thousand bodies to be dug-up and moved from burial ground to make way for £55.7bn high speed railway

[rangerrebew]

 Tens of thousand bodies to be dug-up and moved from burial ground to make way for £55.7bn high speed railway
 

Tens of thousands of bodies will be dug-up and moved to make way to multi-billion pound railway HS2 .

A memorial service will be held on Wednesday for the 60,000 people buried near London Euston railway station whose bodies will be exhumed as part of the high-speed rail project.

Nearby residents in Camden, north London, have branded the decision "outrageous" after unsuccessfully campaigning to save the site at St James' Gardens, which was used as a burial ground from 1790 to 1853.

http://www.msn.com/en-my/news/world/tens-of-thousand-bodies-to-be-dug-up-and-moved-from-burial-ground-to-make-way-for-%c2%a3557bn-high-speed-railway/ar-AAqBr2l?li=BBr8Hnu

[edpc]

They are just going to move the headstones and it's going to be Cuesta Verde all over again.

[Smokin Joe]

They are just going to move the headstones and it's going to be Cuesta Verde all over again.

Wait, don't they have to catch those old strains of disease first?

[driftdiver]

200 years old.  Is there a body left?

[Smokin Joe]

200 years old.  Is there a body left?

It all depends on the soil, pH, drainage, etc. Most likely skeletal remains.

[edpc]

It all depends on the soil, pH, drainage, etc. Most likely skeletal remains.

The drainage and pH can do some interesting things.  See the 'Soap Lady' display at the Mütter Museum.

[Suppressed]

200 years old.  Is there a body left?

From a story about the creator of the "Body Farm":

It began with a colossal mistake: Bill Bass, professor of forensic anthropology at the University of Tennessee, got a corpse's time of death wrong by more than a century.

"This was Colonel Shy," the 80-year-old recalls with a grin. "He was killed in the Battle of Nashville in 1864, during the Civil War." But when his coffin was unearthed in the 1970s, Prof Bass found a body so well preserved that there was still pink tissue on the femur.

"He was embalmed with arsenic and buried in a cast-iron coffin that did not leak," he says. "Nobody had ever looked at arsenic as an embalming agent, nor at what happens to bodies in coffins. So my experience said this had to be somebody who died within the last six months."

[Wingnut]