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The population of the south shore (NOLA + Jefferson) metro area is about 1.3 million. Over 1 million people evacuated, but it's hard to put an exact number on that; when a million people leave in 48 hours nobody is counting exactly how many are in each car, etc.
As anybody who lives here will tell you, there is a significant minority which would not leave under any circumstances. They have no car, are old and conservative and live in a house that did not flood during Betsy, or too young to remember or too foolish. How large is this minority? It is very hard for me to believe it is less than 25 percent. This minority is larger in poor areas because more people don't have cars. Also, there is the matter of Lakeview, with an enormous population of conservative old people who remember that their neighborhood didn't flood or flooded only lightly during Betsy.
The news said 30,000 people were pulled off of rooftops, but that we have less than 1,000 dead. Think about this. This flood was not a storm surge, in most places it came up slowly enough that even infirm people and children could get into the attic. But in many places even the attic then went under. In places where it didn't, the water didn't go down, either. The days after the storm were hot. How long will most people survive in an attic where it is 130 degrees F and 100% humidity for 12 hours a day?
Of all the people who got into their attic -- including all those old people and children -- how many would have been capable of breaking out? We are being asked to believe, given the current casualty number, that 97% of those trapped in attics managed to exit. That seems to me to be ridiculous.
I would be amazed if there are less than 10,000 bodies in attics in Lakeview, the 9th ward, and St. Bernard Parish. 50,000 would be much more believable. It does seem to me that the authorities are maneuvering to conceal this as much as possible.
The unnecessarily chaotic diaspora of the post-Katrina evacuation, splitting families because consecutive busses were going to opposite ends of the country and so on, works to conceal the true count of missing. Most of the missing are almost certainly dead. People have so far been kept out of those same areas even when they have houses that might be salvaged, for example two-storey homes with intact second storeys which might be saved if the first floor was gutted in time and the occasional houses that took little or no water.
In the hours after the storm several officials floated numbers as high as 50,000 dead based on the flooding alone. This seemed reasonable to me. The current estimates of "a few thousand" seem entirely unreasonable to me. That the death toll would be so low makes no sense given what happened and what I know of my fellow citizens, many of whom had what they thought were excellent reasons for staying.
It would be all too convenient if the city decides to condemn entire neighborhoods wholesale and bulldoze them without more than a perfunctory return by those who are capable of grabbing the family photos. I for one won't believe any figure that doesn't have five digits, and I wouldn't argue with any that had six.
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