Ok lets break it down logically.
Lets say there is a virus with 80% lethality or more.
Take a city of 250,000 that leaves 50k survivors, and 200k bodies to bury....
(if that many survivors.)
Now lets say 80% dies of 304,059,724 (July USA POP.) That's over 243.0 Million people dead.
(Source
www.google.com...:en-US

fficial&hs=eVu&ei=mbmNStOxI4fiMKu42a8K&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=r
esult&cd=1&q=population+of+america&spell=1)
Um right FEMA's gonna bury that many people... not.
Even a 1% die off is 304K dead bodies. Still way over what FEMA could handle with its 'stock pile'. Depending on the 'distribution of deaths'
that number could be just one city... or split to all cities with a major airport.
If it's split all across the country FEMA would not need to be bothered. The Local municipals could hand it. It'd still be tough for a city to
handle it, depending on how fast the die off occurred.
Either way you slice the numbers, if the percentage of die off is a 'significant' portion of the US Population, FEMA could not handle it. Not with
their tiny stock pile of coffins.
OK, personally I think it's OK for FEMA to have a way to deal with dead bodies in a natural disaster. Such as Katrina. We all know their crap was not
ready for Katrina, and the dead laid out how long there?
Worst case scenario of any virus situation is 1% or less survival of any given population. In America that would leave roughly 300k survivors...
Then when the power goes out, we'll likely lose another 40% of those, simply due to Age limitations. Too young/old to survive without help or that
have pre-existing medical problems. That die off would happen after 3 weeks or after easy access to food and water fades away. Starvation due to in
ability to forage in such a situation would account for most of those follow on deaths.
After that you get to worry about disease from the dead bodies laying around. Unless you live in a desert, a dead body is not just going to dry up and
not cause a real problem.
So lets be realistic shall we?
The 'FEMA coffins' burial vaults and so on, is not for any large scale kill/die off of the American Population. In theory they could handle maybe
burying -1- major city and that likely would over tax their resources.
Ok, so that leaves mass graves, or cremation pits. Pits not crematories, because the sheer volume involved would be impossible for most furnaces to
handle. If the population die off is greater than 1 percent, you would be lucky to even get a coffin. Much less a FEMA one.
Seriously, FEMA coffins, if that is what they are for, are for small crisis's not major ones. (Small as in Katrina.)
M.
Missed a decimal place
[edit on 20-8-2009 by Moshpet]