What happens when someone is cremated?

one of the things that we offer our families that we serve here is an opportunity to be as present as they want to be when we have a cremation um often they will bring their love they'll have their loved one brought right here to be viewed right here in this room so they can kind of say their goodbyes but also we have our families that want to be present all the way through so sometimes at the cemeteries when we're having a burial you'll have a family that says we want to be here until the caskets lowered into the ground and so you have those same families that you that when we're serving the cremation families they want the same process they want to be involved as long as they can and so as you can see nate we have our crematorian view right here the families can actually be standing here as their loved one is placed for cremation and uh um just about two weeks ago maybe a week ago we had about 30 people in this room three generations grandkids kids spouses of their loved one they they had had them dressed they came and stood here they watched their grandfather father and spouse placed in the crematory and i i stood out here with them and nicole ran the crematory out here and uh it was very rewarding and therapeutic for them to be able to be here you know they hugged and they they cried and and you could tell it was an experience they wouldn't have had had they just said oh we're just going to have dad cremated we'll come pick up the urine next week once the crematory is ready to be turned on the family can actually turn on our crematory from this room if they decide to this is the the main room of the back side of the cremation center and so this is kind of where you know everything starts everything finishes the this is our body lift this is obviously the machine is called a retort and obviously we can't physically put the bodies in ourselves and so this actually helps us once we place the deceased in what's called a cremation container this actually allows us to raise up the body and put it to the level of the retort door that allows us to put it inside so then once we're able to place them inside that's when we can close the door and start the process of the cremation we actually have a computer over here that monitors every aspect of the cremation as far as like temperatures we have the name of the deceased on the computer screen when we have someone in the retort so that we always know who is in the retort at the time we have different settings based on the size of the person because sometimes there is a little bit different setting that needs to be done based on a smaller or larger body we do also use this as a preheat because sometimes we can actually turn it on first before we place the body inside and it has to reach a temperature of 1500 degrees before we're able to actually load the deceased inside and so once we're able to get to that temperature that temperature can vary once the cremation started from 1500 degrees even up to 2000 degrees during the process of the cremation and any cremation can take anywhere from two and a half to three and a half hours depending on on the size of the person that's kind of what we monitor through the process to make sure that everything is going properly and that way we can reduce everything to the certain percentage that we need to actually have it in order to take it to the ash consistency that people are familiar with we do also have this right here that actually serves as an identification center as well we put our paperwork that's called a receipt of human remains so it lists their name the date they came into our care where we picked them up from what funeral director picked them up and who authorized the cremation date time the cremation started and what disc number they are which is this disc right here and this actually stays with them through the entire process um and at the end is zip locked um or zip tied to the remains inside the urn so this yep so we're tracking it the whole time so that people can feel more comfortable that we are you know properly taking care of their loved ones and that we put just as much care into them as we would our own families so we try to keep that on every step of the way and then even inside the urn we place paperwork inside with their loved ones name date date of birth everything all that information so that that is inside to identify so if anything ever happens to the urn that somehow if it's misplaced or or anything like that because we've had people have urns come back to them from that they've left in homes that they've moved into that they brought it to us because it had our paperwork inside and so then we tried to contact the family from that point and so that kind of helps so when someone finds something like that you at least have something to tell who may be inside and so once once the process is complete and here this is the these are the tools that are used to bring the deceased forward out of the retort but once we take them out of the retort it comes into our processing room and this is the machine the bone fragments are placed in this tray here and we basically look for any metal so hip implants knee implants anything like that any screws plates and things like that we pull them out and we actually recycle them so that everything you're getting back is just the bone fragment or the bones of your loved one we're not giving you any of the metal or anything like that so we take that all out and it's then placed in here to process it down to the consistency that most people are familiar with when it comes to cremated remains and then we just fill whatever it come comes down to as far as the urn you know pendants urns things like that once we have it at that point that's what comes home to you as a loved one technology is pretty amazing on these on these crematories the smoke is colorless it's meant to be colorless so in fact as the cremation process is happening if there's any smoke if there's a small amount of smoke it goes into a chamber in the crematory and that smoke is burned and then that process is what makes it colorless so once it goes up into the air you almost all the time no one would know from the street or outside that there's a cremation even happening just to kind of show you some of the tools that we use this is just a just a very heavy duty magnet and so once we have placed all the ashes and the bone fragments in this tray we actually pass through them with this magnet and if there's any metals you know i i had surgery on my shoulders i have seven pins in this shoulder so if i was cremated you know there would be these metal pins in there and this would pull those pins out of the cremated remains so once once the cremation is complete we'll open the main chamber here and then if you see this roller here we'll set the broom on the roller and then we'll we'll kind of go right to the back and we'll pull the remains out and then there's a shaft that drops it down into this box so we'll sweep everything out into that box it all fits no problem i mean less than half of that that box is full but it funnels down into there so we usually start with the the bigger broom there and then we use that flatter uh kind of looks like a garden hoe but it kind of pulls everything that we can get off of the floor into that box another item in in this room here is our refrigeration and we have to keep it at a temperature where the body won't break down at all so right now it shows it at 36 degrees both this building and our downtown building have a shelving system in our refrigeration so we can store up to close to 30 bodies in this building and our downtown building and about 10 in our ammon funeral home and so all together i mean we could we could really have about 70 human remains at one time so if we ever had like a a mass casualty incident a plane crash or or something like that we're equipped to be able to take care of those so this building is really equipped so that if we just had one employee here i mean they could really be doing everything we have a lift that can lift somebody and once we've brought them in off a gurney we can lift them into a cremation container or we can lift them up onto our prep table and the prep table is where we will bathe them we'll dress them we'll we'll clean them up if the family wants to spend time with them but that this is kind of the idea of this room we don't do embalming at this building our embalming procedures are all done at the funeral homes so this this room is mainly for dressing and cleaning and and just preparing for a family to view

Channel: East Idaho News

Views: 2,595,475

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Id: rwCPA4U8nvY

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021