Will the death toll be lower?

[liberalpragmatist]

I certainly hope the reports that deaths are "much less" than 10,000 are true, and many of the quotes have come from New Orleans officials as opposed to FEMA-cronies. Still, I admit to also being skeptical. New Orleans officials could themselves have a major incentive to keep the death toll low so not to discourage people from returning. Certainly FEMA and the federal govt aren't going to want people to think that upwards of 10 or 20,000 are dead. And virtually every eyewitness and journalist on the scene has commented on how there were bodies EVERYWHERE. Plus, any initial sweep won't include the areas that are still flooded or bodies trapped in attics and in homes.

What are your thoughts?

[napi21]

1. Dunno. A post on DU this AM said FEMA ordered a lot more

body bags YESTERDAY! I'll see if I can find the post, but the number was something like 50,000 more!

Here it is:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4719119

[SoCalDem]

27. The people who would be MISSING the dead left behind

are G O N E ...so who's to say?

Will the media interview every evacuee, a few months from now and find out exactly who "vanished" from their family?? Nope.. The media will be fixated on the next missing woman, or a freak snowstorm or some other nonsense..

We will NEVER know the true total..

The people left behind are the ones who bear witness to who's NOT there..

[madokie]

29. The Democrat Party cleaning up republican messes since "33

I want a bumper sticker of that.

[SoCalDem]

30. This place allows you to make your own and buy it

http://65.165.2.251/stickers/data1.asp?TID=5823&FN=db498&SHP=90&TO=2

[ClayZ]

2. I think they will LIE!

and buldoze the bodies in the house. Bet the Orange spray paint marks are lies..... Acutally mean "Dead in here, buldoze quickly"!

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Agreed

------------------------------------------------------
Ditch Bu$h and save the Gulf: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=106&topic_id=22507&mesg_id=22507

Then save the nation!
http://www.geocities.com/greenpartyvoter/electionreform.htm

[still_one]

4. cnn won the injunction to be able to phtograph the death and destruction

at least there will be some accountability we hope

[randr]

5. I certainly hope so.

One thing that confuses me is the reporting of body bag orders. How does anyone know how many bags are being brought in? Will we know how many were used or sent back from the same sources?

[ThomWV]

6. My Guess: 3,000

And its only a guess of course.

I posted it as a likely number the other day, folks told me I had underestimated it considerably. I'm sticking by it.

[liberalpragmatist]

8. Including Mississippi and the rest of Lousiana? - nt

[ThomWV]

14. No.

Just the city of NO.

[linazelle]

20. And you are basing this guess on....???

[Jersey Devil]

7. I think they still have no idea

They haven't broken into houses or looked in any attics yet so anything is speculation at this point, just as the initial predictions were.

[dogday]

9. Already they are underreporting the dead

I expect they will try although CNN has the authority now to get in there and see what is going on. I believe it will be a sizable amount of people in NO and Mississippi. I also think they are under-reporting the death figure to cover their respective asses...

[MissWaverly]

10. I heard that there are 96,000 missing people listed on Red Cross

website, how many end up in the final body count is a matter of spin
control

[Mikimouse]

11. I would bet that it is reported as less than 3,000...

even if it is more than that number (I honestly hope that the numbers are lower than what has been offered in the various media). The BS artists in DC cannot afford for the numbers to be higher than the WTC attacks, or they lose their talking (read:shrieking) points go out the window.

[On the Road]

12. I Think It Will be Less Than 10,000

The reason is that when the levee broke, the water rose steadily. One witness said that it rose one brick every half hour. Unless people were sick, elderly, or disabled, they had time to escape. A lot of people certainly drowned, but I think and hope that was the exception.

I also don't blame FEMA for the drowning deaths unless further information comes out. Once the levees broke, there wasn't any way to prevent the water rising, and the flooded area was very large. Even with more boots on the ground, only a fraction of those people would probably have been saved. The Bush administration is responsible indirectly through underfunding flood control projects.

[linazelle]

21. So the water rose steadily but people had time to escape?

I don't follow your reasoning. First of all, did people know how high the water would rise? I don't think so. So when the water was 1 brick, 2 bricks, etc. they may have thought the flooding would be minor and not left. It takes a helluva lot to make people leave what seem to be perfectly safe homes.

Also, remember that man whose wife was swept away in the flood waters, and those who talked about running into their attics--one particular story where a woman heard downstairs neighbors screaming trying to break through the ceiling/her floor until they went silent after drowning? These people did not have the 1 brick per half hour experience.

[On the Road]

23. Storm Surges were Often Talked About as the Likeliest Source of Flooding

In a storm, the water comes in suddenly and turbulently, often carrying debris, and people of all kinds can be swept away and submerged. In a levee break, that only applies to people immediately near the break.

There are a variety of ways people could have avoided drowning: leave the area before flooding became severe, stay on an upper floor above sea level, swim or float out a second-story window, break through to the roof and wait. I'm not saying it wasn't deadly to some resident, but each one of these possibilities reduced the eventual death toll. And if you live in NO for any length of time, you may have a fairly good idea of whether you're above sea level and thus where the water is likely to stop rising.

[SmokingJacket]

28. In some places it rose 6 feet in five minutes. People were chased

upstairs.

That said, I do think the mayor managed to convince more people to evacuate than previously thought...

[PublicWrath]

13. Looking into the bottom of my teacup I predict:

1) No interim body counts will be released until rage starts to cool.

2) Just before the count is released we'll be told that many of the victims on the missing list were multiply reported by friends and family. This will be used to partially account for the high early projections.

3) There will be one or more highly publicized cases of fraud involving people trying to collect benefits for nonexistent victims. Such cases will be used to create a fuzzy impression that any future uproar about vast numbers of missing people going unaccounted for by the official death toll is only because the wrong sort of people were trying to take advantage of the system and the good hearts of the American people.

[annabanana]

15. you may have hit it!

Whatever number we get, it's crap.

[linazelle]

22. You didn't need a teacup for THAT! But good work anyway. n/t

[tinrobot]

16. I hope the death toll is actually low

But I also hope that every death is reported accurately.

[annabanana]

17. I want them to PROVE IT

Have we seen any reports from St. Gabriel since it was named Mortuary Central? I don't think so.

All the reports of "fewer casualties" have been pretty light on actual INFORMATION (you know the specifics.. like who said it, what area has actually been covered, where the bodies are now... oh you remember.. that FACT stuff)

[AnotherMother4Peace]

18. Can't believe anything that comes out of this administration.

Bush has lied, faked, & bullied his way through life, & apparently so have his cronies. THIS IS NOT OKAY. What a sorry bunch of role models.

[applegrove]

19. I hope the number is very, very small.

[MissWaverly]

24. update on body count

Dutch group to fly in temporary mass mortuary
By Ian Bickerton in Amsterdam
Published: September 8 2005 23:03 | Last updated: September 8 2005 23:03

US authorities have contracted De Boer, a Dutch company that is the world’s biggest supplier of temporary accommodation, to fly in a temporary mass mortuary to the New Orleans area.

The temporary morgue is capable of holding 10,000 bodies but the US Federal Emergency Management Agency has told De Boer to be ready to increase its capacity to accommodate more fatalities, according to Koos Tesselaar, the company chairman.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/009b5f50-20ae-11da-81ef-00000e2511c8%2Cdwp_uuid%3D6ab6c2fa-1adf-11da-a117-00000e2511c8.html

[liberalpragmatist]

26. To be fair, that's from a couple days ago

The reports that the death toll would be less come from yesterday (the 9th) and today (the 10th).

[MissWaverly]

31. I was just reading an account of the pathologist down there

she's been working for 4 days, she says that she is handling a large
"volume" of bodies, and I heard that there are 2,000 from 1 parish alone. Before I read about the portable mortuary, I saw on the news
that everything was going to be handled by retrofitting a warehouse
in St. Genieve and now they are flying in a portable mortuary from
Holland. I think it has gotten beyond let the locals handle it.

[Pobeka]

25. Didn't the Dr. on Oprah's staff say 60 a day were dying at the airport?

And that's at just one location, almost a week after the hurricane.

I find it hard to believe the real number is less than 20,000 for all the hurricane impacted states.

They will obviously try to get the official number as low as possible with any trickery they possibly can. They probably already know the "politically correct" number of casualties, and will gear the accounting to give them something close to that number.

This is why they wanted no media taking pictures of bodies -- because with that as evidence, it would be pretty easy to estimate the real number to within about %20 error -- I'm guessing they are going to cook the books to report less than %80 of the actual number, probably more like %50 or %25 of the actual.

So much for honoring America's dead...