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The 1600 (roughly) is the body count plus some who were reported to have died out of state during the evacuation. The number is still in flux (I've heard rumors of bodies found recently, but not seen reports in the news), but it's not likely to jump significantly.
There are not a lot of people still missing, and that whole "missing" thing is frequently misunderstood. The list of "Missing" that was being batted around, giving numbers as high as 9000, was a list of people that someone was looking for. The majority of those were people who had evacuated in one direction and who were being sought by relatives who went another direction, or often, who already lived out of state. A lot of those entries were duplicates, and some were very vague. If you read the lists (and I looked pretty closely at them), you found entries for people whose names weren't known, or children whose genders and ages weren't known... What was happening is that after the hurricane, people would call to find a loved one (I wen through this). They would report something like this: "My cousin and her husband were in New Orleans and I haven't heard from them. I don't remember his name. THey had three or four children, I think they were 5, 7, 9, and maybe 3. The 3 year old was a boy. The others were two boys and a girl, but I don't know which age. They lived over near Gentilly." Most of those cases have been resolved, and the people who compiled the lists say there aren't large numbers of missing people.
There are still people missing. Some may have fled somewhere else, some may be hiding, some may have died someplace else, and some, no doubt, are dead somewhere near New Orleans, under rubble or stuck in air ducts in houses, etc. There is a often-stated opinion that hundreds or thousands of people were washed out to sea, but there's no real way that could have happened. New Orleans is not on the sea. People washed into the Lake could have floated out to sea, but not hundreds, not even dozens, or people would have spotted them in the Lake. Plus, there were only a couple of places bodies could have gotten in the lake. Same with the River, and it would have been even more difficult for a body to get into the river, since those levees were never topped.
Finally, as for how people died, most died in the initial flood, not in the secondary flood. The hurricane topped a major canal levee and caused a levee on another canal to break, and this flooded the Lower Ninths Ward, causing a lot of deaths. Water topping the levees also flooded the Ninth Ward and other low-lying areas around the Industrial Canal, causing major damage and death. Water also (I think) topped the Lake Pontchartrain levees near Little Woods, and there are places where water came in from the Lake where there just aren't levees. If you drive into New Orleans on I-10 from the east, you'll see a lot of flooded out houses and businesses from the Lake.
A lot of people died because of that flooding. And it wasn't just an "unstated" belief that the people who died were responsible. Even while the hurricane raged, someone from HSD or FEMA stated that a lot of people died and would die because they had not evacuated, and that they would learn their lesson the hard way.
The flooding that flooded the city of the downtown part of the city New Orleans, came from broken levees close to the Lake, along drainage canals meant to siphon water from the city into the Lake. All the pumps failed, and there were no flood gates on the canals. This is the water that slowly flooded New Orleans, and there were a lot of deaths from it, but not nearly as much as from the intitial flooding from the storm surge topping the levees around the Industrial Canal and MR GO Canal (which are closer to the Gulf and therefore more prone to the storm surge). This flooding, however, is what shut New Orleans down, and led to the horrors we saw from criminals, from neglect, etc.
So, there are four main categories of deaths. Those who died while or after evacuating, those who died from the initial hurricane surge, those who died from the flooding from the drainage canal breeches, and those who died through neglect (counting those murdered when all law enforcement broke down). I blame Bush for those, because he would not send in National Guard troops (SOP in such cases) or supplies until five days ofter the hurricane (I got there before the Guard did). The slow response is also responsible for many of the deaths from the secondary flooding, and some of the deaths from the initial storm surge, since, again, the rescue operation was so poor. Nagin had one Coast Guard helicopter available, and had to use it for rescue, and at one point, had to call it off rescue duty to try to plug the broken 17th Street Canal (one of the drainage canals north of the city). That's a choice no one should have to make in a nation as rich as America. There is no telling how many people died after the hurricane while awaiting rescue.
Sorry for the long post. I get going and can't stop! :)
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