Saturday - September 10, 2005

Chicken Little Retraction

Death Toll in New Orleans May Be Lower Than First Feared
NEW ORLEANS (NY Times)

The first organized effort to scour the city for its dead has turned up far fewer bodies than expected, officials said Friday. That raised hopes that the death toll from Hurricane Katrina might be much lower than the 10,000 that the mayor and others had predicted. As the floodwater continued to recede, police officers, National Guard members and members of the 82nd Airborne Division of the Army began to canvass street to street and house to house in the first phase of a hunt to find, remove and identify the dead.

“There’s some encouragement in what we found in the initial sweeps,” Col. Terry J. Ebbert, the city’s director of homeland security, said. “The numbers so far are relatively minor as compared with the dire predictions of 10,000.”

The specter of a five-figure toll was raised this week, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered 25,000 body bags flown to a temporary morgue in St. Gabriel. The official state death count stood at 118. Mississippi reported 211. Colonel Ebbert, who would not provide figures for New Orleans, said it would take two weeks before the search for the dead here could yield a reliable assessment.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans went to Dallas, touring shelters and visiting family members who had evacuated there. He joined Dallas leaders in announcing a citywide relief fund and denouncing the federal emergency agency for what they called its continuing slow response to the crisis.

“It’s a doggone shame that these survivors had to wait in the hot sun for FEMA yesterday, and FEMA didn’t arrive,” Mr. Nagin said.

Perhaps the most promising development to emerge was the first detailed timetable for draining New Orleans. The Army Corps of Engineers said a new computer model showed that all areas of the city would be pumped dry by Oct. 18, about 40 days from the estimate.

The corps had previously said only that the work would take 24 to 80 days. And for the first time since the hurricane slammed into the Gulf Coast, government and utility officials offered a time frame for restoring electricity to the New Orleans downtown business district. They said they hoped to have power turned on and much of the debris cleaned up by the end of next week.

Posted by The Skipper     on 09/10/2005 at 06:41 AM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Media-Bias •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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