VA cemetery enacts new safeguards
Glenn recalls historic space flight Vandals slash tires on 13 vehicles Local Rep. Turner and committee chairman talk to cemetery director.
DAYTON — Dayton National Cemetery has more safeguards in place to ensure veterans and their family members are buried in the right grave sites since two people buried in the 1980s were interred in the unmarked graves of two Civil War veterans, two congressman said.
U.S. Rep. Mike Turner, R-centerville, and U.S. Rep. Jeff Miller, R-fla., and chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, met privately with Cemetery Director Bernie Blizzard on Monday and spoke later to reporters at the sprawling 382-acre Dayton VA Medical Center campus, home of the national cemetery where more than 47,200 people are buried.
The congressmen said they are confident the VA has imposed measures that properly disinterred and reburied the two veterans. On a national tour of VA cemeteries, Miller said he had “full faith and confidence” in the federal agency’s management of burials. Much of the Veterans Affairs old records are on paper, which made mistakes more likely to happen or records easier to lose, Miller said. Blizzard said the cemetery launched a three-month audit of 36,000 grave sites that physically checked each burial site with a registry to ensure proper identification.
The audit concluded in December. The survey found two bodies buried in 1984 in unmarked graves with the remains of veterans buried nearly a century earlier.
“With the audit we just completed, I am very, very confident that we don’t have any more situations like that,” Blizzard said in an interview with the Dayton Daily News. The cemetery director was not at the press conference.
Since April, the cemetery has made more physical checks of internments, Blizzard said. Cemetery workers check in with a burial service and make sure internments are documented properly, he said.
“If there’s a vacant grave site, we always do an investigation before we even consider using it,” Blizzard said.
Each gravestone has a number on the back. The VA has studied whether to mark caskets with a number or identification mark to match gravestones, Blizzard said.
Since the 1990s, the cemetery has an electronic file of every burial, and records changes, Blizzard said. Now, it’s scanning paper records into electronic files, he added.
The VA launched a nationwide audit of its cemeteries in the aftermath of errors found at grave sites in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C., and Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio, Texas.
Miller also opened the possibility of acquiring more land for the future expansion of the 19th century cemetery, but no announcements or additional details were immediately available Monday. The congressmen said the cemetery should be able to continue burials for five to 15 years.
Turner, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, and Miller also were scheduled to tour the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-patterson Air Force Base. Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2363.