Harrison County, MS- 1172 'Missing' 96 Confirmed Fatalities

The Discrepancy Between Missing People and Confirmed Fatalities in Mississippi


by Dr. Ben "Go Fu*k Yourself Cheney" Marble

http://www.opednews.com

There has been a considerable discrepancy between the 1172 individuals reported as 'missing' in Harrison County, MS. and the 96 confirmed fatalities.

This, of course, has led many people to wonder where those people might be located? My own personal theory was that as the 30+ feet storm surge receded many of the people were likely swept out to sea into the Mississippi Sound. For example, I had heard of one report of an Asian woman in Biloxi who had climbed to the top of a tree to hang on for her life who witnessed a mother and her four children being swept away by the water. I also find it interesting that the Harrison County Coroner Gary Hargrove himself expressed similar concerns in a recent interview in the local newspaper where it said, 'Hargrove fears some of the caskets could have been swept into the Mississippi Sound.'

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_dr__ben__051004_the_discrepancy_betw.htm

...that many, many bodies would be swept out to sea and never found....but I'm just a landlocked northerner. what do I know>

my grief for harrison & hancock county is so irrational i wonder if i have gone mad

the discrepancy is there, i am glad we have a courageous person like the good doctor who is willing to pursue it in public

Several problems. First, he takes the 1172 missing from a web page for the Civil Defense which says "not all persons on this list are missing, but at some point during the past few weeks, their status has been inquired about by family members or friends." The coroner in a Sun Herald article says there were 695 missing, and 594 have been identified. We saw this same process after 9-11, where people find friends or relatives and don't even remember reporting them as missing.

http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/12819355.htm

Second, he cites the coroner Hargrove as corroborating his story when the coroner has said there are not hundreds of missing, and certainly not hundreds or thousands more dead. The coroner claims he never believed there were. In fact, Marble uses Hargrove's quote about caskets, from cemetaries, to argue that Hargrove implied people were swept out to sea.

Third, all this "I heard from sources that the Coast Gaurd was finding bodies" is no different than the Freeper whose best friend's brother was a paramedic and reported thousands of dead bodies hanging in trees in Hancock County, or the blogger who reported that his brother's band's drummers--who he assures us is very reliable--reported that Slidell had been completely washed away and that there were hundreds of bodies floating in the lake. Neither story was even close to true.

Fourth, he goes out to Cat Island and wonders at the cars and clothes along the beach, and says he is looking for deead bodies, but doesn't expect that any dead bodies would have survived this long without being eaten or lost. So he's not surprised that he doesn't find any bodies, he says. But he does find bodies. He reports seeing dead deer, boar, snake, a turtle, a dolphin. There's no reason these bodies all survived but all the human bodies were eaten.

I grew up in Harrison County. There are more rumors and fantasies than you could shake a stick at. Until I see some evidence that there are 1172 still missing, or reports of numerous bodies in the surf, or the Coast Gaurd's admission they were told not to pull bodies out of the surf (that's a hard one to buy), I'm going to believe the coroner over Dr. Marble. Hats off to him for calling Cheney an asshole. Now, show me some evidence.

There weren't enough people in Harrison County for 1172 people to be missing and not have that be the biggest story around. There were only 192K people in Harrison County before the storm, and that includes a lot of people inland.

he's just raising the issue to shine the light on the discrepancy and examine the possibility that there are numerous folks that will never be counted as dead. I didn't get the impression he's saying anything definitive. Just asking questions at this point.

We'll probably never know how many actually perished. I'm sure (in)decent numbers of homeless were swept away.

or no evidence. He's trying to claim there are a thousand unaccounted for, but the only source for that number he offers says that the number isn't the actual number of missing. He has no source to even hint that the coroner's number is wrong. He can go to the Sun Herald blog boards as well as I can and see that there aren't hundreds of people searching for missing people.

Everyone knows there were probably people swept out to sea. There were, IIRC, over 40 people never found after Camille. The coroner admits there may be some this time. But there are only 101 still missing, and no evidence that the number is really much higher. Marble is claiming discrepancies that he doesn't prove exist.

until we get the answers. If they aren't missing wonderful but the irresponsibility shown in this disaster coupled with the need to have body numbers be low means we need to keep asking until ALL the questions are answered. People there are too busy trying to live to do an investigation into the missing who may be shadow people but they were Americans and they need to be accounted for.

Just because the coroner has accounted for all of the bodies he was given does not mean he was given all the bodies. They recovered a lot of bodies from the Titanic after the fact out at sea but somebody has to be assigned to do it and nobody has come forward to say that was their assignment here. We have heard a lot of first hand stories about Kenyon and dmort teams but none of them were out in the lake or the ocean and there are houses that are just now searchable after the search was called of in one NOLA parish.

I know the first names of two of the people who live in our 11 unit apartment building I have lived in for a year (I have been very sick and do not even see my family very often). Before I moved here I didn't have anyone who stopped by outside of family I knew two neighbors. I now have an insurance caseworker who I touch bases with once a week and someone who comes by every other week to vacuum and mop. If there were a tragedy here I have no idea where these people are from, if they have any family that would inquire after them. I know none of the people in the apartment buildings on either side of me. This is in "nice" Minnesota.

They want this to go away. Just like dictators threw the bodies in the rivers, mass graves and crematoriums to make them go away the BFEE is of the same ilk. We cannot let them get away with (or let them think they can) because we want to believe that it couldn't happen here. Freedom isn't free and democracy is sometimes messy.

Very different situation.

I understand there were small ethinic fishing villages along the coast that could not evacuate in time. Would the coroner know the names of the people there? Would they have anyone left to ask about them?

Come to think of it the tidal surge was bigger in parts of MS than in NOLA.

New Orleans wasn't destroyed by the tidal surge, it was destroyed by a broken levy (caused by the surge) which flooded an entire district where tens of thousands of people lived. The flood was quick, and may people crawled or swam into their attics out of an instinct to reach higher ground, and so there may be dozens or hundreds of bodies in attics that need to be searched. The water was eventually drained from this district, with pumps. Two other major levy breaches caused further flooding, and that's the water that flooded near the Superdome and downtown.

In Mississippi a large tidal surge struck the first four blocks along the coastline, then receded back to sea, carrying cars, houses, debris, and no dount people. There was no long-term standing water, and the search for survivors and bodies began even before the winds died down.

New Orleans was without power, phones or any reliable communication for a month. Mississippi had most of it's power back on within a week, and all of it within two weeks, except the few blocks along the 26 miles of coastline. I heard from my parents within three days, so phone service was quickly restored, though it wasn't consistent.

There were no "ethnic fishing villages" along the Mississippi Coast in Harrison County. It's all one long populated area. There were communities within the cities. In Biloxi, for instance, there is a Viet Namese section of town, and it was badly hit. But it wasn't some quaint, isolated village on a remote shoreline cut off from all outside humanity by geographic, cultural and linguistic barriers. It was part of the city. Further east, in Hancock County (Waveland, Pearlington, Bay St. Louis, the Kiln, Diamondhead, Clairmont Harbor, places like that) there were a mix of shrimpers and recreational boaters. Still no small isolated villages of lonely ethnic villagers ignored and ignorant of the outside world. And that's Hancock County, which isn't even what the article was about. West of Hancock County is Louisiana.

Harrison County starts at the Bay of St. Louis and stretches to Biloxi Bay. It's all one long populated area. Henderson Point (which isn't even a town, but used to have some cool roughneck bars--might still, I don't know), Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport and Biloxi follow one right after the other. There are no "ethnic villages." This is all one 26 mile long stretch of beach along a seawall. No hidden coves, no secret lands that time forgot. All one tourist area. Highway 90 runs right alongside the seawall the entire way, with a brief interruption for the Gulfport port.

Now down in Louisiana, the coastline is very different. There are numerous towns and villages and "ethnic" communities down in there. Most of them were completely evacuated. A Viet Namese fisherman living in Louisiana still understands the phrase "Get out, hurricane coming." He has family and friends. Might startle you to know, but he even has white friends (and often family). People would notice him missing.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are still a lot of people missing along the Louisiana coast, and if some of them are dead. Maybe even hundreds. I don't know the area as well as I know Mississippi. And the geography is very different. There is a lot of swampland, and lot of low lying canals and land below sea level. There is nothing like that in Harrison County, Mississippi.

You're confusing areas that you don't seem to know a lot about. If there were a thousand people reported missing in Harrison County, it would be a big story in Harrison County Mississippi. My parents and sister and brother and three best friends would all be telling me about it when I spoke to them. They aren't. There aren't. Even the coroner, no doubt a complete Republican automaton hiding the truth from the town where he has lived over forty years to protect Lord and Master George Bush's political career, admits there may be people washed away that we never hear about. But there aren't thousands of them. And those wouldn't be in that number of 1172 that the article cites, anyway, since those 1172 reports all came from people searching for their loved ones. No "shadow people" there.

New Orleans and Mississippi are very different situations.

to a "very nice place, and are enjoying the good life" in their new hometown..

Out of sight..out of mind.. The "property owners" will be counted because they are a revenue source, but people who were renters and lived paycheck to paycheck will not be "missed"..or counted