The unofficial death toll for Hurricane Katrina fell by six to 1,356 on Thursday, October 26. The total number of bodies received in Louisiana mortuaries from the storm is now at 1,062, however, it has been determined that 12 of those people were not killed by the storm, but instead died from other causes.
Louisiana is continuing to discover about one new body every day on average, but they body recovery rate is clearly declining rapidly. My previous posting noted that relatives of some supposed Katrina victims, including a fellow named Jason Zito, were upset because their loved ones were included in the death count, while the protestors said that in fact, the so-called hurricane victims had died from other unrelated causes.
Just under 50% of the bodies have been identified, a sorry figure, but quite a bit higher than previous tolls. It looks like major progress is finally being made in identifying bodies. Also, the cost of Hurricane Katrina, a little-reported story, is now estimated at an incredible $200 billion.
Furthermore, the city of NOLA seems destined to be devastated far into the future, as I noted in a previous post recently. Estimates are that the future population of NOLA will be reduced by an astounding 50% and the city's budget will be hammered by a 2/3 reduction. 250,000 homes are uninhabitable, a surreal figure.
Republican talking heads continue to hammer on the issue of the initial death toll being inflated. But as the "Numbers Guy" column in the Wall Street Journal notes, such overestimates are commonplace in the early days after a disaster and also occurred after 9-11.
An earlier column by the same author deals with the whole array of issues surrounding of death tolls and tolls of the missing after wars and disasters.
Topics include how accurate they are, counts of the missing, why tolls vary, how long it takes to get a real count and how they determine if someone actually died in the storm. The first column notes that the inflated dead, missing and evacuee totals after the storm were reported by various outlets ranging across the political spectrum.
It is simply not appropriate to use the excessive initial death estimate of Katrina as a liberals-are-evil-liars talking point, and it's vaguely disrespectful to the victims and their loved ones anyway as the suggestion is,"Hey, Katrina wasn't so bad after all." Recommended reading.
The roundup:
Louisiana: Thur., October 27: 1,050 Mississippi: Wed., October 19: 228 Florida: Wed., October 19: 14 Alabama: Wed., October 19: 2 Georgia: Wed., October 19: 2 Ohio1: Fri., September 23: 2 Kentucky2: Fri., September 23: 1 Evacuees3: Tues. October 4: 57 Total: 1,356Footnoted totals are controversial. Explanations for controversial totals follows:
1The Ohio victims are Cassondra Ground, 19, of Monroeville, Ohio and Thelma Niedzinski, 84, of Norwalk, Ohio. Both were killed in a car accident near Monroeville, Ohio on August 30, 2005. The Ohio State Highway Patrol felt that a wet road caused by Hurricane Katrina caused the car accident. See Ohioans Focus on Helping Katrina Victims, by Jay Cohen, Associated Press , August 31, 2005
2The Kentucky victim was Deanna Petsch, 10, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. On August 29, 2005, she fell into a Hurricane Katrina-swollen ditch in Hopkinsville and drowned. See Storm Surge: State Gets Soaked, City Avoids Major Flooding, Homes, Life Lost in Hopkinsville , Sheldon S. Shafer and James Malone, The Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal, August 31, 2005
353 of the 57 hurricane evacuee deaths occurred in Texas after evacuating the storm; the total includes two suicides in Texas. Two more evacuees died in Tennessee. Two other evacuees died in an unknown location.
I consider all of these deaths to be storm-related, and it is my understanding that authorities felt they were hurricane-related also. The evacuees section is particularly controversial.
Critics have suggested that the evacuee death toll of 57 deaths is simply a normal death toll for the huge number of evacuees. Yet the figure of 57 dead is far lower than the number of evacuees who died after the storm - a very large number of evacuees died post-Katrina, but the vast majority of them are not included in this tally.
For example, this tally mostly includes evacuees in Texas, omitting the huge number of evacuees from Louisiana, for whom a dubious zero deaths are recorded. Furthermore, evacuees in very poor health or on the verge of death post-Katrina never even made it to Texas; they were evacuated to hospitals, often via airplane.
It is my understanding that officials consider the 57 deaths (mostly in Texas) that occurred very soon after the hurricane to be hurricane-related. Apparently most of the deaths were exacerbated by the stress of the hurricane. The two suicides in Texas have also been questioned.
However, they both occurred very rapidly after the storm and I understand that they are considered to be hurricane-related. There have been many more suicides post-Katrina that are not yet included in this tally.
This section needs further research. Critics with valid data helping to clarify the evacuee death toll are encouraged to email me at the email address at the top right of this page. See 57 Evacuees Reported Dead; At Least 2 Committed Suicide, Steve Quinn, Associated Press, September 15, 2005.
Rightwing talking point 1: Sure, Cuba can evacuate people well in a hurricane, but that's because they don't have a free society. In a free society such as ours, the Cuban evacuation model cannot be emulated.
A commenter named "flick100785" on the Usenet newsgroup alt.terrorism.world-trade-center answered this challenge better than I ever could on October 3. I quote (edited):
You see, the Cubans have stocks of emergency supplies for all because they have no class of redneck Yuppies who refuse to pay taxes.Rightwing talking point 2: Nagin's NOLA government failed to get the NOLA population evacuated in a timely manner.
And it happens to be progress for a state to grow from commanding people to leave land they've farmed to "forcing" them to accept help in fleeing a hurricane.
The very American idea that one is "free" sitting on a rooftop with your dawg and a cooler of rapidly warming beer is a redneck fantasy.
By definition, people in this group who post here to the effect that that is anything else other than a redneck fantasy are NOT in the situation which they seem to define as "freedom", because none of the people actually up s---'s creek in Nawlins owned laptops themselves, or, if they did, were able to connect to the Internet.
Indeed, we can more or less reconstruct the mental processes of clowns who here believe this crap. Basically, "government", to them, means the contemplation of their own wasted and degenerated super-ego, which, under the haze of their defective character, represents the super-ego's dreary commands to be a f-----g human being, like that of their long departed ex-wife.
In their fantasy life, they find it erotically charged to think of themselves partying on a roof like the "Cullud" people, but only in fantasy, and they defend therefore the freedom of shadows.
It is a uniquely American savagery to replace compassion by this content-less form of freedom.
I believe it was Baudrillard who shows how Disneyland has trained Americans to think in virtualized forms about real issues.
Or as T. S. Eliot, who happened to be an American poet after all, wrote:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed in white and brown
Til human voices wake us and we drown.
I would like to request that someone please show me a single evacuation plan for any major US city that even claims that it is humanly *possible* to get 100% of the city's population out in only three days.
Because this is an impossibility, a potent federal response - in particular, a large federal search and rescue team that is on the ground and moving within 12 hours of the disaster -is necessary. If the National Guard or Coast Guard has a comprehensive plan ultimately supplied by the Commander in Chief, it is surely possible to get our men in uniform there and have them setting up basic operations within 12 hours.
Furthermore, attacks on Nagin's response need to note that the NOLA government did far better than any previous disaster run had predicted.
Rightwing talking point 3: Because Nagin failed to evacuate his city, the federal government is absolved of all responsibility for any Katrina deaths. And anyway, it's the residents' fault for not being prepared for disasters.
Is it really ok for NOLA citizens to have to wait for four whole days for any reasonable federal response to a disaster that the Feds knew about at least three days before it occurred?
What sense does it make to demand that residents all keep "survival kits," or a three-day supply of water or a generator to keep their insulin cold? Just how long should we have to wait for a federal response to a disaster or terrorist attack, anyway?
Rightwing talking point 4: The examples of the city of Houston during Hurricane Rita and the states of Alabama and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina show that large US cities and whole regions of states can indeed by evacuated very quickly.
Houston, Mississippi and Alabama prove nothing of the kind. In Houston, literally thousands of motorists ran out of gas on the clogged freeways, frozen to a near-halt, trying to get out. Many who were running out of gas decided to turn around and go back home before their gas tanks did run empty.
On the day before Rita hit, officials finally rounded up some gas tankers and sent them to the crawling highways to try to refuel all the stalled motorists. On the same day, Houston emergency officials told these same stranded motorists to please turn around and go back home (into the wrath of Rita).
Officials indicated it was too late for them to make it out of Rita's path to safety. Officials finally implemented contra-flow on the highways (both directions on a 2-way highway going the same day), but this was done much too late.
Regarding Alabama, residents of Mobile have informed us that most of Mobile was not evacuated; the vast majority simply refused to leave.
And if Mississippi did such a great job of getting 100% of its population out of the way, how did 228 Mississippians die in the storm? In fact, the available evidence indicates that NOLA did a much better job of evacuating people than Mississippi did.
This post was written with the assistance of valuable posts from "Robin" on the alt.politics.democrats Usenet group.
"I have stuck a finger in woman’s asses before, once by accident. I was with a girlfriend who was an anal sex freak who had probably done it 2,000 times. I went to put my finger in her pussy and I put it in her ass instead, just like all those Asian “Wong ho!” jokes! I guess a lot of anal changes your ass because that finger went right in like it was nothing. The whole finger went in, no problem at all."
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