After 20 years working with City cemetery crews preparing graves for Islamic interments, Rene Hopp’s more recent flash of inspiration earned him the thanks of all such crews whose jobs he made both safer and easier.
Rene, for the last eight years the City’s cemetery horticultural team lead, was standing in for a cemetery ops crew team lead one day last summer when he watched them prepare for an Islamic burial.
Cemetery staff are extremely sensitive to various cultural traditions that must be observed in burials. Three of the City’s cemeteries have Islamic sections, with gravesites aligned on a surveyed northeast-southwest line, so people can be buried facing toward Mecca.
In an Islamic burial, two male family members descend into the grave and arrange loose dirt so their loved one’s shroud-wrapped body can be handed down by three other family members, and placed on its side. The walls of the bottom 36 inches of the grave are lined with concrete walls; the bottom is bare earth.
Because the grave is a little over two meters deep, the sides of the grave above the concrete liner must be temporarily shored up to protect family members inside the grave from an upper-grave wall collapse.
This summer, Rene watched as the crew struggled to carry and lower 80-pound, wood-and-cast-iron grave wall structures onto each side wall of the grave. Behind those and at each end, thick plywood walls were slipped in to form a ‘box’ around the upper four feet or so of the grave.
“I remembered how incredibly difficult it was to manhandle these bulky structures into place,” says Rene. It was hard, back-breaking work, fertile ground for workplace injury.”
“I figured we could do something with aluminum that would end up not only lighter and easier to handle, but would look far more elegant for the families.”
Rene took the challenge to Fleet Services’ fabrication shop at the Westwood Facility.
“They were great. Together we worked out a design using built-in pins that drop into holes, forming a four-wall aluminum protective structure.
“The old structures were placed on the inside of the concrete grave liner, so they were 80 inches tall. The new structure’s walls sit on top of the liner, so they only needed to be 40 inches tall.
“Now the crews need only lift 38-pound sides and drop their pins into the holes of 12-pound end walls. It’s so much easier for the crew,” he says. “The new system is going to prevent accidents resulting from staff lifting awkwardly-designed materials.”
Rene says the ‘fab shop’ made three copies of the new liner within 30 days.
He points out that liners like the ones the City is using now are unique – nothing like them is commercially available.