Burial Committee

The Burial Committee was one of the first functional organizations created by the Boulder Free Zone, formed to address the overwhelming public health crisis posed by tens of thousands of unburied corpses. Chaired by Chad Norris, a former undertaker's assistant from Morristown, New Jersey, the committee was voted into existence at the Free Zone's first mass meeting on August 18, 1990, as the fifth item on the agenda. Its initial mandate called for at least twenty persons, but the committee quickly grew as the scale of the task became apparent. Norris later secured an amendment, proposed by Harold Lauder, that the committee's size would increase by two for every hundred new arrivals in the Zone, ensuring the workforce kept pace with the steady influx of survivors.

Organization and Methods

The Burial Committee operated from the Greyhound Bus Terminal between Arapahoe and Walnut streets, which served as its base of operations. Norris divided his volunteers into three six-man crews, each assigned a specific area of town. A fourth crew, led by Norris himself and two assistants, prepared the burial site and handled the final interment. The primary burial site was located about ten miles southwest of Boulder in an area that had once been stripmined for coal, a bleak landscape Norris grimly called "Burial Site #1." Workers wore boots, protective clothing, and heavy-duty Playtex rubber gloves; gas masks from the local National Guard armory were used only when the stench became overwhelming. The process was industrialized: bodies were loaded into dump trucks, then dumped onto large sheets of plastic sheeting spread on the ground. Norris and his assistants used rakes to spread the corpses evenly, pulled the edges of the plastic together, and sealed the shroud with an industrial stapling gun. A bright yellow bulldozer then pushed the sealed package into a long rectangular cut in the earth.

The Work and Its Toll

The work was physically and emotionally brutal. Norris warned his men at the outset that they would have to think of the bodies as "cordwood" to endure the task, and that those who needed to vomit should do so out of sight of the others. Harold Lauder, who volunteered for the committee, found that the sound of change falling from the pockets of the dead as they were raked across the plastic sheeting haunted his dreams. Despite the horror, the committee's morale remained surprisingly high. Norris praised his men after each day's work, acknowledging that the job took "something out of a man" but emphasizing its critical importance: "It isn't too bad now, but if we've still got twenty thousand corpses in Boulder next month when it gets to be wet weather, people are going to get sick." The men responded with fierce loyalty; many, including Harold Lauder, returned day after day. By late August, Norris reported to the Free Zone Committee that the Burial Committee had interred an incredible twenty-five thousand corpses in three weeks, and that the worst of the work was behind them. He credited the relatively low number of bodies in Boulder—compared to the city's pre-plague population—to a mass exodus during the epidemic, when a false rumor that the superflu had originated at the Boulder Air Testing Center had driven most of the city's residents to flee.

Significance and Legacy

The Burial Committee's work was widely regarded as the most important job in the Zone during its first months. Norris himself told his men that if they could not continue, they must find replacements, because the task could not stop. The committee's efforts were a crucial step in the Zone's transition from a collection of traumatized survivors to a functioning community, allowing the living to begin the work of rebuilding without the constant threat of disease from the unburied dead. The committee also served as a powerful symbol of the Zone's commitment to decency and order in the face of chaos, and its members—especially Harold Lauder, who earned the nickname "Hawk" for his dedication—were held in high esteem by the community.