Escalating funeral costs is being blamed for the soaring amount of unclaimed bodies being stored in temporary freezers outside the largest hospital in Newfoundland. Provinces across the country have logged a jump in these numbers in recent years. It s prompted some communities to build new storage facilities, while others are turning to memorial fundraisers. CTV s Garrett Berry on the solutions set for St. John's.
00:00:00.000Escalating funeral costs is being blamed for the soaring amount of unclaimed bodies being stored in temporary freezers outside the largest hospital in Newfoundland.
00:00:09.700Provinces across the country have logged a jump in these numbers in recent years.
00:00:14.140It's prompted some communities to build new storage facilities while others are turning to memorial fundraisers.
00:00:20.760CTV's Garrett Berry on the solutions set for St. John's.
00:00:25.260On a hot Newfoundland day, bodies still kept cool.
00:00:29.040In what officials call a temporary and temperature-controlled storage facility.
00:00:34.780Inside these units, unclaimed remains, human bodies that haven't yet been buried.
00:00:40.380Officials today say they may are weeks away from a better solution to move human remains back inside the hospital and then a new permanent home in store in October.
00:00:51.500Still, they say they don't really know why morgue space has become so full.
00:00:55.780We saw this problem creeping up at us.
00:00:58.380Obviously, there's something that's shifted in society, you know, something changed.
00:01:03.640There's some insight from Ontario, where new data shows the number of unclaimed human remains is rising fast.