It is our responsibility to maintain the cemetery and all its grounds to the best of our ability. The very first order of precedence has to be to attend to funerals. The number of funerals per day can range from two or fourteen or more (which is what we have today as I am writing this article). Next would be general maintenance, which goes on all year long and includes such things as trimming, landscaping, mowing, weeding, road maintenance, trash removal, floral removals, irrigation and grave site preparation. Cleaning of the areas is scheduled weekly and during all the major holidays throughout the year. Other types of scheduled maintenance would be setting and resetting of headstones, gravesite foundation preparation, memorial preparations and inscriptions and vase placements.

General workorders, which fall next in line, would include adding soil to a site, leveling a headstone, cleaning a site, but they can also be graffiti removal, trimming of trees, hedges or bushes, checking foundations, removal of illegal planting, replacement of stones or vases and the like. We have continuous flow of about 150 or 200 such workorders all year round. That is to say that as we are completing workorders, new work requests are being placed daily. This may make it a little easier to see why work orders can sometimes take a month or more to complete.