Sorry if this is a ridiculous question, but I come from a two story town that's not all that old. Do old apartment buildings in big cities ever have incinerators in the basement, or is that something they made up to dispose of bodies in movies? And yes, I know bones might not burn, especially teeth, but do these things even exist?
Only incinerator I know of here is the one on my friend's mom's farm. But I remember reading a few books where the incinerator was where the residents burned their trash. I think nowadays, yeah, it's seen as more sinister but I blame Hollywood.
In older sections of NYC, yes. Here's an article from the New York Times from 1996 discussing the pollution and safety issues with these aging incinerators. Outmoded incinerators in 2,500 New York City apartment buildings pose a serious health risk - particularly in Manhattan where they are surrounded by new, taller buildings - and should be shut down, according to a petition to be sent today to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency by a group of scientists, legislators and environmental organizations. The risks also exist, the group says, in neighborhoods surrounding most of the hospitals in the city and at three municipal incinerators where antiquated equipment is used to burn garbage. ''The problem, in a nutshell,'' said Eric A. Goldstein, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which organized the petition, ''is that most of these incinerators are 30 years old or more and they have very rudimentary designs.'' ''They have virtually no modern pollution controls,'' Mr. Goldstein continued. ''They have low stack heights. The people who operate them are frequently superintendents or janitors who are not trained in combustion techniques. And, because they are located in areas of high-density population, they create a serious localized air-pollution problem.'' https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/27/nyregion/hazard-seen-for-new-york-from-outdated-incinerators.html
My elementary and high school both had incinerators, also suburban Chicago, though they had discontinued using them by the mid 80s. I still remember the stench when they burned plastic and the lunch waste.
Yeah, I realize the tech has upgraded, it's probably a lot different than the kind we had in high school in the 70's (probably built in the 40's or 50's). I suppose steam (or is it hot water?) is still a very efficient way to heat a building.
I have a hard-on for old industrial tech. It makes me sad to see these kind of old clunky machines go extinct
When I was stationed at Tempelhof in Berlin - an entire USAF base under one monstrous roof - the mechanical room was a complex of rooms that ran under parts of the building. There were tunnels everywhere, many of which had been barred shut, but the main "clunky old machines" the Nazis had put in where still there, huge and baroque like anime technology. You'd have loved it.
Efficient in the sense that the infrastructure is already there, and the cost of retrofitting to another system of heating would be prohibitive. The only alternative, really, is electric heating, and that is not an option where the cost of electric power is high (and I believe that New York City is in that category).
I remember reading a story somewhere and there was an incinerator in the basement of a hospital building which was used to dispose of the biohazard materials - bloody, dirty linen, clothing contaminated with bodily fluids, blood, etc. I *THINK* this was during the HIV/AIDS crisis that was developing during the 1980s and people were burning everything that an HIV+ person or a person who died of AIDS touched out of fear. I don't think the hospitals used their incinerators to dispose of bodies other than cadavers that medical students practiced on perhaps but in your story, if the idea is to dispose of a body, there's no reason why your character can't sneak one into a hospital and slip it in with all the things that are scheduled to be disposed of (especially if it is in pieces) and then walk away. Unless the police show up to investigate right away, that evidence is going to be gone fairly quickly.
Heck my parents put in a wood burning furnace in their home in the late 70's. Dad took it out when he got tired of chopping wood and getting up in the middle of the night to stoke it.
My uncle had one of them, think it ran on pellets or something in an automatic feed system though. I could be wrong, only saw it once ages ago.
My university in PA used to be an orphanage before it became a convent then a college, then a university. The university was basically built up around that main orphanage/building. It still has an incinerator in the basement. Its been closed off to students, but the archivist brings ghost tours down there and they are still finding stuff hidden down there too. For example, they found a stained pair of silk ladies gloves behind a loose brick in the wall near the incinerator and a few other things stuffed in there that are on display in the archive. Kinda of makes you wonder what happened....
The apartment building that we stayed at for spring break in Montreal had an incinerator chute. We threw a white pillow down it that we spilled red wine on. Good times lol. But yeah, that apartment building was *not* that old. Probably from the 70's or 80's, modern renovations aside. I highly doubt that that pillow went straight into an incinerator without first going through some collection spot, but I can't say for sure. I know absolutely nothing about how they work or are designed. Some people say you can still hear that pillow screaming to this day...
In the US, hospitals would not be burning actual biological waste. There are regulatory restrictions on that sort of thing. Most use a specialty service for that.
Oh? I was under the impression it was common. Like, isn't it risker to move the waste from the hospital to a disposal site? It would make more sense to me to dispose of it on the scene instead of shipping it out and running the risk of it going missing via a hijacking or a misplaced shipment. Anyways....where would this waste be shipped to? You've got me curious now..... Is it the morgue that would dispose of this waste?