"we may never know exactly how many people we have lost ...

[preciousdove]

http://www.nola.com/newsflash/weather/index.ssf?/base/news-5/1126997041152711.xml&storylist=hurricane

Amid the ruins, Miss. quietly buries its dead

9/17/2005, 5:35 p.m. CT
By VICKI SMITH
The Associated Press

...Three weeks after the storm, the death toll stands at 219. More than 30 coastal victims have been buried or cremated, while dozens of corpses remain to be identified at a temporary morgue at the Gulfport airport....

"It is a much slower process that the government has gone through than we had anticipated," said Chip Riemann, general manager of Riemann Funeral Homes, which lost four of its six homes to Katrina.

Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove said the reason is that more than 100 bodies have yet to be identified. At the morgue, courier trucks carrying records arrive daily.

The first to be identified were those found with some form of personal identification. Most of the remainder were swept from their homes without IDs — sometimes with no clothing.

"Of course," Hargrove said, "we may never know exactly how many people we have lost ... if we don't recover their body."

[SmokingJacket]

1. We should be able to find out *exactly* how many died.

Damn, I hope we do.

[bemildred]

2. And actually, we are really hoping we won't have to be very precise ...

Compare this with all the "we will never forget" bullshit
after 9/11; this time it's "We don't want to remember".

[Raster]

5. ...after all, how many of us really knew poor blacks in New Orleans

go about your business, nothing to see. kkkarl rove and haliburton are on the job.

[illflem]

3. I was thinking much the same

no telling how many bodies washed out to sea or are buried deep in rubble not to be found till a much later date.

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. Simple. Who's missing?

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. full family disapears who reprots them?

[babylonsister]

8. Other relatives? Friends? The majority of us have someone

who might miss us.

[nadinbrzezinski]

9. I ask again who reports

you as a friend have no legal authority to report ... only direct family and if direct family is all dead... well Missing will be the best you will get, best case scenario

I hate to break it to people but disapearing and changing numbers is VERY EASY in a disaster of this scope... and I firmly believe bushco has that in the works.

Oh and yes time people wake up to this... they are that evil

[Joe Chi Minh]

11. What are you talking about legal authority for?

This has got nothing to do with legal authority. It's about finding out how many people are missing, after a historic national cataclysm.

The senior Democrat in every state should advertise in the most appropriate newspapers in their state, or on local TV, requesting relatives and/or friends (particularly if the missing person had no relatives) to write to him/her reporting such persons missing. The compilation and sifting of the state and then the federal records would cost money, of course, so the operation would be dependent on gifts - unless paid for from taxes with the accession of a Democratic government.

Actuarial expertise would have to be used, I dare say, to calculate the number of people who might have been expected to die from other causes. A rolling register of victims suffering significant ongoing sickness and premature death would also be of great interest.

If you have federal databases relating to employment, social security, etc., it might even be more practicable for them to be analysed to establish the missing persons, post-cataclysm.

This would come to constitute a historical record, and presumably might be exected to be accurate to within a few percent.

Finally, the names could be preserved on a memorial with all the names of the missing/dead, not unlike the Vietnam memorial at Arlington, I think.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Sorry to be a broken record

they don't want to find the exact number, for the 3000 number of 9.11 cannot be breached...

[tom_paine]

12. Unquestionably. The body count will be massively suppressed.

They may even be so bold as to push it under 1000.

Why not? They have gotten away with every single lie they've told. Even after the lies are exposed, 99% of the Imperial Subjects of Amerika still believe it to be true.

[shance]

10. Hiding the evidence. People disappear with no accountability.

n/t

[lindisfarne]

13. Want to know how many people have died? Memorial. Start collecting

names for a memorial. Nearly every family who lost someone will want the name of the person who died on that memorial.