? What is the total # of known dead and missing from Katrina

[Botany]

Maybe it is just living in Ohio and watching a presidential election
being stolen as the local and national press tells me that everything
is fine but I really wonder what the true figure of the # killed by Katrina
and washed away by the flooding afterwards really is.

I once figured that in New Orleans alone it had to be greater then 3,500.

I wonder if the Texas company brought in to do the body recovery and
autopsy work might have also been charged w/ keeping the # down.

[Syncronaut Seven]

1. If they haven't been forthcoming with this info

Expect them to continue to be unhelpfull.

The dirty little secret? The toll is significantly higher than the 9/11 death toll.

To admit that, would be political suicide.

[Botany]

4. I once figured in New Orleans

that of 100,000 who stayed in the city
50,000 went to the Super Dome and Convention Center
another 3,600 were airlifted by helicopters from roof tops
and roughly 20,000 rode it out in their homes and were evacuated
by boat and bus later ...... that still leaves 26,400 people and
when they were still giving out the figure 10,000 were reported as
missing.

[leftofthedial]

2. at least 2 missing

emperor dingleberry

and michael brown

[electron_blue]

3. I also want to know.

[baldguy]

5. They evacuate the city

Scatter the population over the entire country, refuse to allow them to return to rebuild, etc etc.

The city is half the size it was before, but they say that only 1800 people died.

and they're still finding bodies a year later. Its probably more like 7000-10,000.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

6. watching on CSPAN 2 "They are still finding bodies"

author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City

[Yupster]

7. Here's a link

to someone who has apparently been keeping a running count.

He/she has it at about 1,800.

http://robertlindsay.blogspot.com/2006/05/katrina-death-toll-surges-to-1836.html

[MissWaverly]

9. Here are two snips you might find interesting

New Orleans Mayor Nagin has predicted thousands will have perished, telling NBC's "Today" show, "It wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000 " <14>. Indeed the latest reports are of FEMA having 25,000 body bags on hand <15>. Let us hope that they are wrong - but the FAILURE of the Bush Administration and FEMA to provide assistance for ONE WEEK and the average 3 DAY SURVIVAL WITHOUT WATER at 30°C (86°F) suggest otherwise.

http://www.countercurrents.org/us-polya090905.htm


1-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina looms, the death toll from the Hurricane has taken a serious drop, as Louisiana has apparently weeded out many of the out of state deaths in a short post-Hurricane period as not related to the Hurricane. The death toll has dropped from 1,836 to 1,723, a drop of 113 deaths.

http://robertlindsay.blogspot.com/2006/08/katrina-death-toll-plummets-to-1723.html

[Yupster]

25. Geeze Nagin's been a disappointment

though to be fair during disasters there are often wide estimates of loss. I remember on 9-11 there were talks of 10,000 dead too.

[MissWaverly]

27. I am not sure he was wrong

remember Chertoff flew over the area and when they asked him, he said thousands.

Remember, this cabinet is literal, they didn't release Plame's name, they just said
Joseph Wilson's wife. So, 1700 bodies have been recovered, how many were swept in
the Gulf and disappeared by other purposeful neglect.

[jobycom]

29. You think 8000 bodies were swept down the canal to the Gulf

and no one noticed? New Orleans isn't on the Gulf. It's between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Due to an odd geography, the Mississippi river is, I'm guessing, fifty miles from New Orleans to the Gulf, but to the east the Gulf is only a few miles away. The storm surge that flooded New Orleans came into Lake Pontchartrain and up the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal (MR GO, for short). MR GO caused the most damage--that's where the water flowed into Chalmette and the Lower Ninth Ward, and it's also where the surge that broke the Industrial Canal levee came from--that's the levee that killed so many people in the Lower Ninth, and that broke again during Rita.

The Mississippi River levees were not topped or broken, so bodies could have only gotten into the Mississippi River through the Industrial Canal and the levee break. 8000 bodies floating in the Industrial Canal would have looked like logs in a river, and would have been highly visible in the constant video feed of that levee break over the next few days. The water that topped the levees along MR GO was trapped inside the levees, so it's not possible for it to have carried 8000 bodies back across the levees. Same with the levees along Lake Pontchartrain, except below I-10, where some bodies could have been washed into the Lake. But this was a region that was heavily evacuated, because the danger was obvious. Plus, again, 8000 bodies in Lake Pontchartrain would have been visible in all of the aerial footage shot over the next couple of weeks. There are two (IIRC) outlets from Lake Pontchartrain into the Gulf, but the water was receding very slowly through them, and the bodies would have been stuck in the Lake.

So if they weren't clogging up the river, the canals, and the Lake (and we know they weren't or they'd have been highly visible), and they couldn't have been carried out to the Gulf (A few dozen maybe, but not 8000), then where are the bodies? If they only recovered around 1300 bodies from the houses, that means they left more than four times the number of bodies still in the houses. YOu don't think that would stink, that people would notice THAT much of an oversight? If the bodies were collected and taken somewhere to dispose of them, then where? The 1300 they did find overwhelmed the system.

ANd if there are 8000 more dead than reported, where are the relatives who miss them? Where are the tens of thousands of family and friends looking for them. True, it was all so badly organized that hundreds could have slipped through the cracks. But there are plenty of non-governmental missing persons centers who would have no reason to lie, or to protect Bush. Did the officials in New Orleans just get really lucky that most of the people they decided to dispose of had no family or friends who would want to find them?

I'm open to anything with Bush in charge, but without any evidence to support it, I can't believe there are 8000 bodies that no one has missed out there. Let's quit assuming that the number that we have proof of isn't bad enough.

[MissWaverly]

30. No, I read on of the fringe blogs

that primitive crematoriums were set up by the mercenaries that were sent down there to
"police" the place and bodies were disposed of.

[jobycom]

31. Where did the smoke go?

The media had cameras on sight every time there was a whiff of smoke. ANd that doesn't explain why no one is looking for those 8000.

[MissWaverly]

32. smoke from where?

I read that these sights were in "neighborhoods" that had been abandoned, these mercenaries
controlled the streets after dark, I read where there was a whole warehouse filled with bodies.
I don't know if this is fact or fiction but I know that there was an original request for
25,000 body bags and I remember seeing on Tv that after they built that mobile morgue there
was another request for 10,000 body bags. I read a lot of blogs at the time, I posted one here
that said an eyewitness say 800 bodies but the death toll for the entire state was just 300 and
this was only in 1 location. Also was there a 100 square miles of the Gulf Coast impacted by
Hurricane Katrina and there were less than 2,000 bodies, and as to the question of why wouldn't
people be looking for them, if an entire family disappears who is going to question it, esp.
when the entire city population has been split up everywhere.

Brother of Cairo native rescues many victims of Hurricane Katrina

Moberly Monitor ^ | 9/8/05 | Amy Compney
Posted on 09/08/2005 12:08:07 PM PDT by TrebleRebel
Davis said Gator has been busy rescuing as many people as he can; when she spoke to him last, he had taken over 50 people into his home to give them food and shelter. He has pulled almost that many dead bodies out of the water and taken them to I-90, where he told Davis there were about 800 corpses lined up along the road for rescue workers to retrieve. It was 102 degrees when Davis got to speak to her brother and the mosquitoes and flies were eating the survivors alive.

Why did the governor of Miss today say there were "just over 300" dead in the entire state?
http://209.157.64.201/focus/f-news/1480391/posts

[jobycom]

33. They always order many times what they need.

People hear body bag numbers, they assume that it's one bag for one body. Not the way it works. First, they put body parts in separate bags when a body has been torn apart. Second, they need enough body bags to send them out with all the different searchers. They don't just keep them at a central location and send out exactly the number of bags needed after a body is found. They order many times the number of bodies they expect. If Nagin ordered 25,000, he had already reduced his fears to around 5 or 6 thousand.

Nagin was just guessing, based on nothing but how many houses he saw and how much fear he had.

I read a lot of rumors after Katrina. Most of them were lies. People were reporting that Slidell was completely gone and thousands of people were hanging from trees in Hancock County--both rumors were absolutely confirmed by a friend of a friend. I was in Hancock County right after Katrina, there are several regular DUers who lived there when the hurricane hit. I never saw thousands of bodies hanging from trees, and I haven't met anyone else who has, either. And I've been to Slidell a dozen times since the hurricane--it isn't completely gone, it isn't even mostly gone.

And again, I have to ask, if there are 8000 missing bodies, where are the relatives and friends trying to find them?

[MissWaverly]

34. thanks for your input

my niece went down there as a red cross volunteer; she said that you can't imagine the devastation, but again, we are not familiar with population numbers, Baltimore has upwards
of 400,000 people so if our city was flooded like the Gulf Coast, there would be a huge
body count.

:-)

[jobycom]

8. 1836 total, but it's a complicated number

That number includes 1577 from Louisiana, some of whom died during the evacuation and from storm-related causes after they evacuated to other states. I THINK that the total who died in Louisiana was 1464, and the other 113 died after they evacuated to other states. Katrina kille people from Cuba up to Ohio.

It's a complicated number because at first the only number reported was the actual body count in the morgues. That number was of course low, because it didn't include the missing. The missing in a situation like this were difficult to determine, because of the complete scattering. There were numbers as high as six to ten thousand missing not too long after the storm, but these were lists of people who were being searched for by someone. For instance, right after the hurricane I was trying to find my parents, and searched web sites to look for resources. Several asked me to fill out a form to report that I was looking for them. I almost did, but finally heard from them on Wednesday. Many did fill out such forms. The people they were looking for were classified as "missing." It didn't mean they were really missing--my parents were in their house--but it meant someone was trying to find them.

This missing number dwindled quickly as phone service was restored, but even so the list remained large, because of the scattering of New Orleans. I read one story of a child separated from her parents for eight months. She and her godmother had been evacuated to San Antonio, then moved to Georgia, and they lost track of the child's mother, who was evacuated somewhere else and moved. They were both alive, but all of the people involved were missing.

A lot of people tried to equate "missing" with "dead," not understanding the difference.

However, there are still people whose bodies have not been recovered but who are presumed dead, and so this official tally has begun to include them. The number of dead in Louisiana jumped by a couple hundred when they were added, and then jumped again when they began tallying those who had died elsewhere.

I don't think there has been a conspiracy to keep numbers down--there are too many local officials who wnat the truth fully known for that to happen--but there were groups, especially the Republicans in DC, who wanted the numbers to stay low until people lost interest in the story. That explains some of the confusion and slow counting of the bodies. However, the situation was just not right for quick, accurate counts. Badly decayed bodies were stuffed into morgues without power where they sat awaiting forensic examination, to determine identity, or cause of death (couldn't rule out murder until the body was examined). It was a mess. In both NOLA and Mississippi the officials were ordering that bodies be left alone until after all rescue efforts were complete, because resources were so thin that they didn't want to waste them on collecting the dead. It was just a mess, in other words.

But that's the official total. I suspect it is higher than that, but it's not thousands higher, and not even hundreds higher. Dozens, at the most, and probably not in the high dozens. There just aren't enough still missing for the number to be too much higher, though I'm sure there are deaths of evacuees that haven't been reported.

[Botany]

11. thank you

So glad to hear that your family is O.K.

[jobycom]

13. Thanks. Not half as glad as I was

:)

[SmokingJacket]

22. Excellent, thorough response. THANKS! nt

[dogday]

10. I can't imagine how many died as a

direct result of Katrina... You don't hear about that figure on the news.

Our government failed miserably on this, and as citizens we should all be concerned about the lack of help to the people.....

[Eric J in MN]

12. They decided not to enter houses when no one answers...

...which prevented a real count of the dead.

[jobycom]

14. That's not really true.

They searched using several methods, including cadaver dogs. They relied on the dogs, on the smell, and on reports from others. There were many houses that were not enterable due to extreme damage. I don't know if you've ever been in a flooded house, but all the furniture and appliances float, and when the water begins to recede, it flows out of the doors and windows, which carries furniture and appliance up against the doors and windows. In addition, if the water reached the ceiling, the sheetrock on the ceiling would fall when the water receded, further blocking entry. So it is very difficult to get into houses--not even including the swollen door jambs and corroded locks. If there was no sign of dead and no easy entry, they left the house alone. But if there was a smell or if the dogs discovered something, they went in. Or rather, they marked the outside of the house and recovery crews went in.

In Mississippi they actually had a little RC robot they sent into every structure, because it could get into tighter spots and between pancaked floors. They would not even allow people back into the region to go into their homes until the robot had searched them.

They are still finding bodies occasionally, but the bodies are hidden, usually. They found one in the AC ductwork of a house near the 17th Street Canal, and they found one under a refrigerator and other debris in, I believe, the Lower Ninth. That body had been missed by the son of the dead woman, who had searched the house once before and not found her.

I'm not saying there wasn't gross dereliction, and that the firms hired for the task did a good job. But they did get the majority of bodies in the first search. The devastation is stunning, and it's impossible to think anyone could have found all the bodies in the first search. I'm sure there are still some out there. There are whole sections of the city that look as though they were flooded last week.

[Eric J in MN]

15. I don't know about Mississippi. I was reporting what I read about

..New Orleans.

[jobycom]

18. They couldn't have recovered any bodies, then.

I was talking about New Orleans. New Orleans was empty of people during much of the body search. They couldn't have gone into any home if there had to be someone there to let them in. People weren't even allowed back into their homes for months in same areas.

[lies and propaganda]

19. why are you taking up for them?

are you gonna say that they really did bring water, that they didnt turn around Walmart trucks full of suupplies, that the Gretna police did let them cross, that brwonie actually did a heckuva job?

give me a break.

They are distorting the number of Katrina deaths just like they are in Iraq.

[earth mom]

21. Good question-I agree with you. I'd bet good money that 10K are dead

at the VERY least! :grr:

[Yupster]

24. Maybe 100,000

since we're throwing numbers out.

[jobycom]

26. What?

I'm not even going to bother.

[Eric J in MN]

20. Hence, they weren't entering most homes during the body search

...and the count of the dead is a fraction of the real number.

[EFerrari]

23. And that means, our government is now "disappearing" us. n/t

[jobycom]

28. Geeze.

I explained above the way the searches were handled. I was there while they were doing it, in Gulfport. We were all glued to the tv and the Internet (once power came back up), when we weren't out with chainsaws and crowbars, or trying to help friends get into their houses. The details of the search and rescue were on all channels all the time.

What pisses me off about these goofy claims about 10K dead is that it undermines the real number. 1500+ people died in New Orleans. Hundreds of those died in the aftermath, in ways that were quite preventable. The number may be a little low, as I explained above, but if 10K people were missing there would be more people on the missings lists. There would be more families trying to find people. YOu would know, in other words.

But when we have people shouting out that "They're all conspiring to make people disappear! The numbers are faked! Ten thousand bodies have disappeared!" it makes people tune out what really happened. Close to 2000 people died. Hundreds of them died due to Bush's dereliction. The true story is horrifying. Don't weaken it with these Republican-esque exaggerations and evidence-less claims. You think Nagin and Broussard would help Bush hide thousands of dead people? That's just nonsense.

And if you have evidence, lay it out.

[EFerrari]

35. You have no idea how many people died. None.

What we have is evidence of malfeasance at every level of government. There's nothing "goofy " about that.

No one is undermining anything. If we had a functioning government, we wouldn't even have to have this conversation.

There were stories in LBN about bodies found in homes that were already marked as having none. They are still TODAY finding bodies.

So, forgive me if I don't buy into your story but believe my lying eyes.

[jobycom]

37. Tell me what your lying eyes have seen, then.

How many bodies did you see? How many did your friends see? How closely have you followed what was happening? How many people did you know on the "missing" lists? Where do you get your numbers from? WHat is your evidence that the official total is wrong other than that you hope the number is much higher?

If you've got info I don't, tell me. Give me the proof. I've backed up everything I've said with arguments as to why I believe what I do. You've hurled Republican-esque insults about nasty governments and the way things must have been. Give me some proof.

This isn't some goddamn theoretical bullshit game to me, and it's not an excuse to work out my fantasies about Big Brother. It's very goddamned real to me, and I'm sick to death of baseless, factless wild-ass theories from people without a fucking clue. If you have a clue, give it to me. Tell me. Prove me wrong. But don't accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about unless you can counter my facts with facts of your own proving it.

[MissWaverly]

36. yes, I agree, we should focus on what we do know for sure

there are still thousands of people who need help, rather than wear our tin foil hats let's concentrate on what is happening and what did occur. That's the only way we can do right
for everyone who went through this horrible experience.

:-)
Miss Waverly
a hardheaded yankee

[benddem]

16. Weekend Sunday on NPR

had a segment on the missing from Katrini this AM. I thought the man said there were only 180 missing but it could be the 1800 no. written above. They think that many people from St.Bernards parish were just whisked out to sea and died and bodies will never be recovered. They interviewed a woman whose father is missing. He lived in a travel trailer and only had a bicycle. They are hoping someone convinced him to leave and he has just not surfaced...maybe amnesia. They didn't say if the travel trailer was still there.

[EFerrari]

17. I'm not sanguine that we have or will have an accurate count

any time soon. The 1800 number is a result of massive CYA at local, state and federal levels of government.

I'm listening right now to a BookTv segment by an engineer recounting how his team was excluded at every turn from finding out what happened at those levees.

We've already seen several stories in LBN about houses marked as containing no bodies where bodies have been found. What about the poor people washed out to sea. What about the bodies in the water pumped back into the Lake.

There are too many things we don't know.

[aaronbees]

38. I talked with a woman this weekend who's convinced

the number of deaths is larger than the official tally. This was at a dinner and one-year-anniversary event in my town for evacuees who stayed here and agencies that helped out in the recovery. From Plaquemines Parish, she said there were many Vietnamese residents in the area whom she said would not have left the area and didn't seem to be there when she returned to take care of her family's property. Now, I'm not saying that's proof of anything, except that there's reason to be somewhat skeptical of offical tallies when they may not include those folks who are harder to track down. I myself am skeptical of the official tally but don't quite believe there's a conspiracy to limit the number -- just difficulties with the logistics of a large-scale tally such as this.