 The Victorian state coroner announced a tripling of dead bodies being placed in the state mortuary during the heat wave, filling the morgue to capacity.Hospitals and funeral homes were relied upon to provide temporary storage of corpses, even before the deaths associated with the Black Saturday bushfires created additional demand for mortuary space.Throughout the heat wave, thousands of people, many of them elderly, were confirmed to have been treated by ambulance officers and placed in hospitals for heat-related illnesses in Victoria and South Australia.