Reply #8: We'll Never Know [View All]

[Amelie]

I've heard that we'll never have an accurate death count because, depending on the official cause of death, the person may not be considered part of the toll. For example, my brother-in-law pulled a grandfather and grand-daughter out of a house; the grandfather had been giving all food to the child for many days, and died minutes after getting into the rescue boat; "exhaustion" killed the old man, not the hurricane. A man on our block had a heart attack and drowned in the floodwaters; he died from a heart attack, not the hurricane.

Then there are the less obvious ones. My great-aunt, 84 years old, had lived on the same block since the 1920s. She was an invalid and would not have survived one week in post-Katrina New Orleans. She came with us and lived for three weeks at my mother's house, and then went to Florida to live with her nephew. I think the realization that she would never go home killed her. Katrina killed her, even though she died several months after Katrina.

A good friend of ours is in the National Guard, and he swears he saw thousands of bodies floating in the days after Katrina. There's no way we'll know how many lives Katrina claimed.