In Florida, funeral home workers struggle to keep up with the dying
CBSN
Richard Prindiville, director of Highland Funeral Home in Apopka, Florida, is used to working long days in what is a notoriously grueling profession. But nothing in his more than two decades in the business has prepared him for the torrent of death caused by the latest COVID-19 wave in the state.
"There's been days I've come home and I'm exhausted and I'm talking to my daughter and I'm falling asleep as I'm talking to her," he told CBS MoneyWatch. "Every day is funerals and funerals and funerals." Prindiville, 48, routinely works 14-hour days booking funerals, meeting with grieving families, transporting bodies and overseeing services, not to mention managing his staff and handling the myriad other duties small businesses must perform. And with hundreds of Floridians succumbing to the disease, the task of disposing the dead with dignity falls upon pallbearers, morticians and other so-called last responders like Prindiville.Two climbers were waiting to be rescued near the peak of Denali, a colossal mountain that towers over miles of vast tundra in southern Alaska, officials said Wednesday. Originally part of a three-person team that became stranded near the top of the mountain, the climbers put out a distress call more than 30 hours earlier suggesting they were hypothermic and unable to descend on their own, according to the National Park Service.
There's no making up for what Olympic hurdler Lashinda Demus lost on the day she finished .07 seconds behind a Russian opponent who, everyone later learned, was doping. What the American 400-meter hurdles champion will finally receive is a great day under the Eiffel Tower where she'll be presented with the gold medal she was denied 12 years ago at the London Olympics.