Flooding and erosion leads to exposed vaults and caskets at cemetery

COLLINGDALE, Pa. - Flooding and erosion led to quite the mess at a Delaware County cemetery. FOX 29's Bruce Gordon spoke with the cemetery owner.

Diamonique Robinson rushed to the Mount Zion cemetery in Collingdale to check on her grandparents' gravesite Thursday after her father told her of a social media post he had seen.

"A mudslide or something. I went on the actual page," she told FOX 29. 

 A woman with family buried there sent to FOX 29 and posted to Facebook, pictures of exposed vaults and caskets in a washed-out section of the cemetery back in July. Those pictures have been shared more than 600 times.

She returned this week to show the shocking mess that remained.

So what actually happened at this historic cemetery?

Turns out, the rain-swollen creek that borders Mount Zion washed over and around the pipe designed to carry water beneath this part of the cemetery, carving out a deep channel and disrupting nearly a dozen gravesites. 

“Never seen nothing like it. It’s never happened before," Mount Zion Memorial Park longtime owner Joe Barbine said. “Naturally, water is going to find a way to go and that’s the path right there. It went right through here, like a river and washed most of the dirt right out."

Barbine says he’s spent the last six weeks backfilling the eroded channel then he can reposition the headstones. 

They’re numbered, so getting everything back in the right place should not be difficult.  He says he’s taking a lot of heat on Facebook from people calling the situation “disgraceful” and implying he is somehow at fault.

“Speculating on what happened. Like, I didn’t do this. I didn’t come over here and dig a trench, you know what I mean?" he said.

The owner also asks for people to have patience during the cleanup process.