New Orleans: How many are still missing?

It's been three months since Katrina hit, and we still don't have a real casualty count. When you consider the number of bodies that may be undiscovered, destroyed, or lost at sea, the only reasonable way of counting the dead is to count the missing.

So how many people are acutally missing? I'm really asking. I've seen numbers ranging in the 4,000 to 6,000 range, but I haven't seen a really solid number on this. If we were on top of the situation, we would have developed a database for all the evacuees. Everyone evacuated would be given a photo ID, and be asked to provide the names of any friends, family, or acquantences living in NOLA. This would be built into digital records tree, where you could match names to people, and find out who is still unaccounted for, and where seperated family members are.

I have to admit, I never thought we would really see a disaster that could turn a major American city into a ghost town. Whenever I see footage of New Orleans, I'm reminded of post-Apocalyptic cinema. But this is not the kind of response that I would have envisioned to such a disaster if it occurred. Maybe I'm naive, maybe I've seen to many movies. But I always sort of imagined that if this actually happened, there would be a lot more done, by a lot more people.

and many are still in houses rotting... :cry:

Plaquemines Parish is - well, it's basically gone. The shoreline is enormously changed (the old borders still show if you select them, but there is no land where the old borders are). The shoreline west of Plaquemines Parish is massively changed as well. Entire towns are gone all along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts.

Not only are thousands missing, but even more have had no record whatsoever made of where they were sent during the evacuation. Many people who were in nursing homes are unable to identify themselves, because of dementia, stroke, etc - and are warehoused all over the country as "John/Jane Doe".

Last count I heard was 6,600 counted as missing, with no breakdown as to how many are washed out to sea, how many still not located, and how many evacuated who knows where and not accounted for.

They cannot be counted. :(

When the time comes for those checks, where is our government planning to mail them?

Don't we have census records?

Why don't we know where our people are?

:D

Must be the hour. do we have federal records of our citizens or not?

It's not as difficult as you might think to be "off the grid." If you live in the boonies with no phone, no power, and no accounts, then you might as well not exist. There would be nothing to say "This person existed here." Even if they had a SSN, you don't have an address for that, you don't get an address from a birth certificate, etcetera. Without things like car insurance, bank accounts, etcetera, you're a ghost.

... but I have met folks from Parishes like Lafourche, Terrebonne, Iberia, Vermillion, etc. who did not speak English (only French or Spanish), read or write, or even have drivers licenses... Plaquemines Parish was wiped out. :cry:



You don't have to appreciate my "wit" nor anything I do. When I laugh, I am also crying. My anger, sadness, and happiness is intertwined, inextricable. Every day I hear bad news about my home (which is in Orleans), city and friends. What you see is an act of catharsis... black humor overwrought with profound pain.

Porque no puedo ver tu información personal y no le conozco.

how to hide. Don't mess with a Cajun, he'll gut you with his skinny knife and eat you in his next bowl of gumbo, man.

First, there weren't a lot of people in New Orleans washed out to sea. New Orleans isn't on a sea. The water from the levee breaks drained slowly or was pumped back out into the Lake, so there wasn't a massive backwash, as you'd find on a coastline. The first levee break, along the Industrial Seaway, was sudden, and a lot of water rushed in at once. There was probably a decent backwash at first, but after that the water drained more slowly back into the canal. This was the Ninth Ward area. For a body to be "washed out to sea" it would have had to drain from the canal into the River, or the Lake. There may have been some in the River, but there weren't the hundreds or even thousands people have insinuated.

There probably are still bodies under the debris or in houses here and there. Some of these died after the hurricane, too, because of the slow response. But keep in mind that most often someone knew when a friend or family member stayed behind, and checked on them after the storm, or had someone else check on them. Many of the house-to-house searches were based on tips from people looking for loved ones.

The "missing persons" lists aren't good estimates of the dead. They are lists of people who someone is looking for. If you read through the names, you find a lot of discrepancies--kids, for instance, whose last name is not known, or sometimes whose gender is not known. Obviously not a close relative filing the report. Often a parent or grandparent is trying to locate a child who lived with the other parent, and who evacuated somewhere. Sometimes the parent doesn't want the kid found. (I'm not speculating, this is what the people who keep the missing kids list say). The missing adults lists aren't any better--they have partial entries with missing genders, races, home towns, misspelled names (I saw a listing for several "Abares," which of course if a misspelling of the name "Hebert." You can see why that person would never be found.)

The centers who keep these lists, last I heard a couple of weeks ago, said there were about four thousand unresolved missing persons reports, and they guessed that maybe a couple hundred of those were actually missing or would turn up dead. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of unidentified bodies, so many of the dead on these lists are already included in the body counts.

There are people who died while evacuating or who died after evacuating, and this number may never be added to the list. But they aren't technically missing.

All in all it seems likely that the death toll will rise by a couple hundred. Maybe more, maybe less, but there aren't 4000 to 6000 thousand bodies hiding somewhere. There may not even be hundreds.

That's New Orleans. In Mississippi, the coroner says there are still 20 unaccoutned for. That's a coastline, so that's where people are likely to be washed out to sea. There are a lot of rumors floating around, of course. Keep in mind that most of the Katrina rumors have turned out to be false--no hundreds of dead floating in lake Pontchartrain at Slidell, no thousands of bodies hanging from trees in Hancock County. I grew up on the coast in Mississippi, and there is no better place in the world for tall tales and urban myths. I was just there over Thanksgiving, and everyone could tell you about the secret morgues with hundreds of bodies, or the sonar images of a hundred bodies on the Gulf bottom, or the Coast Gaurd officers who were ordered not to recover all the bodies they found floating at sea that were being eaten by sharks. All the same types of stories I grew up hearing, and none of which turned out to be true.

I don't know much about the region of Louisiana south of New Orleans. It is not as heavily populated. Parts of the area still seem to be underwater. On the other hand, these regions are more local, and people know each other more. I heard reports before the hurricane of evacuations from some of these regions where the chief of police could tell you who stayed, and where. There weren't many who stayed. Katrina was a powerful Category Five when the evacuations began, and this is a part of the country where everyone knows what that means. Most people who could got out. Probably not everyone, though.

I'd guess there are a couple hundred dead that haven't been counted yet. Probably a few dozen bodies washed away or destroyed in the whole region. There will be a reasonably accurate count by next year, I'd say, after tax records are examined and a more detailed search of survivors occurs. Right now Louisiana is broke, so the Feds will have to fund it for a full report to be made in Louisiana.

I write too much. Sorry.

I fear you are wrong, especially concerning the Southernmost Louisiana parishes.

I haven't heard much from the south La parishes, but I haven't heard stories of large numbers of missing people, not even through the rumor mills. I've seen film and pictures of East Plaquemines and the lower river areas, and the destruction is horrible, but I haven't heard of large numbers of missing, not even in rumors. But as I say, I have no inside knowledge of the area at all, I'm just going off the reports I've seen, for that area.

My knowledge of the missing lists isn't guessing, for the record. I looked at the lists, I contacted the centers and received emails from them, I read their web pages, and I followed stories written by others who checked into them. The info could still be wrong, but it's what the centers themselves are saying.

the Times Picayune, that it will be very hard to get an actual body count. There were dozens and dozens of bodies hanging in the trees alone (coastal area) - I heard this on a police scanner. When I was in New Orleans in October, the whole city smelled like death, but some of that was moldy houses and fridges with rotting food. Going into the 9th Ward, and other areas the smell got much worse. I, pesonally, am missing dozens of friends, but that doesn't mean they are dead.

I fear it will be discovered that the most Southern part of Louisiana will account for many deaths, but there are/were many many people who are not part of the "written record," and it may take years to find out. There were lots of undocumented workers from Latin America, not including the Islenos who have been there for centuries, who may never be accounted for. According to my gut feeling, your estimate is low, but it makes me feel better to read it nonetheless. I want to be wrong sooooo bad. :(

That there were hundreds of bodies hanging from trees. The story was attributed to a paramedic who had been in the area. It wasn't true. Cops repeat stories, too, even on scanners. There was also a story in the early days after the hurricane that Slidell was wiped out completely, and that there were hundreds of bodies floating in the Lake where the harbor used to be. Completely untrue, again. Both stories were told with a great amount of convincing detail. The story about the bodies hanging from trees accompanies every major flood, by the way, and it's usually an exageration or outright false.

The smell of death is everywhere in Mississippi, too. In Gulfport a load of container cars carrying meat spilled everywhere, and hasn't been fully cleaned yet. Restaurants and supermarkets and butchers were destroyed, so meat is everywhere in Louisiana, too. Not to mention pets, racoons, wild animals--all those critters you see crawling into canals or storm drains late at night.

The number could be very high. I just haven't seen evidence of it. I reserve belief until I see evidence. There's just so many stories around every incident like this, and most aren't true.

and a database to ID the missing/dead was set up right away. Lists of the names were published and memorial were held. The NYT's ran personal stories about each person who was lost. They published their pictures in numerous posters and collages.

With the NOLA disaster they haven't even started the DNA testing, the president called for one national day of prayer, not even a day of mourning and no one knows who died and whose missing. It is absolutely disgusting how the country is treating the victims of this disaster.