CHARLESTON, SC (WCSC) - On Sunday, several families visited their loved one at the Monrovia Cemetery in Downtown Charleston, but when they got there they found that several caskets were lifted out of the ground due to flooding inside the grounds and several plots still covered in flood water.
Around ten caskets are above ground at the cemetery with the headstones displaced and water surrounding each plot. Another dozen graves are still under several inches of water.
Cemetery board member Bryan McNeil says this is due to heavy and consistent rains in the area.
Jamaria Myers’ mother has been buried at the Monrovia Cemetery for 11 years. Myers says she’s never seen anything like this before and that it breaks her heart.
“I was crying about this until I got to work. This is bad," Myers says. “I literally woke up of my sleep to my mom’s casket picture being floated around on the internet.”
Myers wants the cemetery to take responsibility for the property the family’s trust their passed loved ones to.
“They need to do better, stop putting people out here, this is sad, they need to stop putting people out here and refund people, so they can move someone,” Myers says. “That’s probably some of their family as well under water, just because hers is on top doesn’t mean the water isn’t seeping into others and then they will be like that eventually in a couple weeks.”
However, McNeil says this is not the graveyard’s responsibility to fix, it’s the funeral home’s that buried the caskets.
He says on Monday workers will assess the damaged caskets and headstones to see which funeral homes need to be contacted, then it is up to the funeral home to contact the family members to let them know what is going on. The family and respective funeral home will then need to decide how they want to proceed with fixing the flooded sites.
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