I’ve seen a few numbers here and there around the net and mentioned on the television news, and after reading duranta’s diary, They don’t want to know how many are dead, I got curious. I did a quick google to see what I could find.
I started to post this as a comment in the above diary, but it was so lengthy that I thought I’d put it in diary format.
If anyone else has links, please add a comment.
(What I found below the fold)
(Please note that some of the numbers include overlap. I haven’t taken the time yet to piece that out.)
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First, in a previous diary (The lid has blown off this place!) I paraphrased a television news report from Jed Kahane from CTV news,
There are 15 coroner’s working now, and they can’t keep up with the bodies.
The coroners are finding the bodies of their friends.
There are 6 refrigerated tractor trailers filling up with bodies. They showed them sitting side by side by side … you get the visual.
Rotten fish and food (pallets of chicken) is throwing off search dogs in their search for bodies.
What I didn’t catch at the time but saw in a re-broadcast and documented over at kid oakland’s blog in a comment (death toll), was a snippet from one of the coroners,
They interviewed one coroner who said he had been working for 2 1/2 hours and had already found 18 bodies.
- 6 refrigerator tractor trailors
- 15 coroners
- 18 bodies
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The first official count of New Orleans’s dead stood at 59. But bodies were everywhere: floating in canals, slumped in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways and medians and hidden in attics. Michael Leavitt, the administration’s health and human services secretary, said: “It is evident that (the number of dead) is in the thousands.” (link)
- 59 ‘official’
- bodies everywhere
- in the thousands
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“We don’t know how many people are actually stuck in houses,” Landrieu said. “We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of homes that have been under six, eight, 10, 12 feet of water for a long period of time.” (link)
- Many may have been rescued, but it is important to note that we’re talking 100s of 1000s of homes that will need to be searched.
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“I think it’s evident it’s in the thousands,” Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Sunday on CNN, echoing predictions by city and state officials last week. The U.S. Public Health Service said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies. (link)
- again, in the thousands
- one morgue alone expects 1000-2000 bodies
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Body recovery teams, meanwhile, have begun the grim task of recovering the dead as rescues continue across the city — one week after Hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast flooding New Orleans.
Only 59 bodies have been recovered so far, including 10 from the Louisiana Superdome where more than 20,000 people gathered in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.
But officials believe the death toll could easily be in the thousands.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin told CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme on Canada AM Monday about 40,000 to 45,000 people remained unaccounted for.
“There was 500,000 people in this city before the storm. We evacuated probably 80 per cent of them which leaves about a hundred to a hundred and seven thousand.
“We have evacuated from the Superdome and the convention centre about 50 to 55,000 people. So that leaves you about 40 to 45,000 people unaccounted for.” (link)
- body recovery teams
- 10/59 ‘official’ from Superdome
- 40 000 to 45 000 not accounted for
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For the first time, a U.S. federal official has acknowledged what many had feared. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt said Sunday the death toll from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is in the thousands.
“It’s clear to me that this has been sickeningly difficult and profoundly tragic,” Leavitt said.
(…)
Earlier Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said “We need to prepare the country for what’s coming.” Chertoff declined to estimate the number of dead but conceded that an untold number of people could have perished in swamped homes and temporary shelters where many went for days without food or water. (U.S. must be prepared for what’s coming (Taken for title of this diary).)
- again in the thousands but from Chertoff and Leavitt
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The recovered bodies are being taken to refrigerated trucks at collection sites and then moved to a portable morgue near Baton Rouge.
Officials there will use DNA technology, dental records, fingerprints and photographs to identify the victims. (link)
- refrigerated trucks
- portable morgue
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The authorities said a fleet of refrigerated semi-trailer tractor trucks has been assembled to harvest the rotting corpses. But in an interview with ABC television, Honore was unable to say how many dead they would find.
“We expect it to be a significant number of people based on those who were evacuated and in the low-lying areas,” he said. “There’s some bad news still yet to come on that subject.” (link)
- fleet of refrigerated trucks
- significant number by Honore
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Twenty-two bodies were collected at the Intestate 10 split with I-610, Cataldie said.
Authorities have not been able to gather bodies from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. Witnesses there say they have seen dozens of dead bodies in the vast complex, which was used as a shelter earlier in the week.
Over the next few weeks, plans call for dead bodies to be collected along with whatever documentation and personal effects can be found, said Todd Ellis of FEMA’s disaster area mortuary operation response team. The corpses will go to a temporary morgue in St. Gabriel, where authorities plan to take photographs, dental X-rays and fingerprints.
At that point, the bodies will be released to the state, Ellis said. (link)
- 22 bodies from Intestate 10 split with I-610
- dozens of dead in Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
- temporary morque in St. Gabriel
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Most of the 59 bodies recovered so far in the wake of Hurricane Katrina cannot be identified immediately because they floated in floodwaters too long or decomposed in stifling heat, state medical officials said Sunday.
Rescue workers continued to find survivors in the New Orleans area Sunday even as the gruesome task of recovering bodies began in earnest. Some of the bodies were people who have been dead almost a week.
The 59 victims were people who were killed by the hurricane in the New Orleans area or died later in hospitals.
“I don’t think a visual identification will be possible,” Dr. Louis Cataldie, state medical officer for the Office of Public Health, said Sunday. “It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the body. It’s an individual. Each death is enough. It’s horrific.”
Cataldie said he expects to be able to identify about 20 of the bodies collected Sunday because they were of people hospitalized before dying at evacuation centers, including the Superdome and New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport.
(…)
Crews are bringing the bodies by boat to a collection point at the intersection of interstates 10 and 610 east of New Orleans. From there, the bodies are taken to St. Gabriel.
“We treat each of these individuals with the respect they deserve,” Ellis said.
Digital dental X-rays, photographs, fingerprints and DNA samples are taken to help identify the bodies.
Four bodies each were recovered from Baton Rouge General Medical Center, Our Lake Medical Center and the East Baton Rouge Parish coroner’s morgue. Nine others were of people who died at the airport awaiting airlifts to hospitals. All were critically ill patients evacuated from New Orleans hospitals.
(…)
In Jefferson Parish, officials reported finding 95 bodies, but Cataldie said those will not be included in the official count until they are processed. Another four deaths were reported in Alexandria, and Don Smithburg, CEO of the LSU Health Sciences Center, said he knows of about a dozen bodies in his hospitals. Some could have been there before the storm hit, though.
The mortuary response teams expect to process 144 bodies per day when the morgue in St. Gabriel is fully operational. Cataldie said special care will be taken with each body because the process is not aimed at “just getting somebody through the line” quickly so another body can be processed. (link)
- not sure how this relates to the 59 ‘official’ – official means identified?
- 20 bodies from Superdome, Louis Armstrong International Airport
- 4 bodies from Baton Rouge General Medical Center, Our Lake Medical Center, East Baton Rouge Parish coroner’s morgue
- 9 bodies of those who died at the airport awaiting airlifts
- 95 bodies in Jefferson Parrish, not included in official count until processed
- 4 bodies from Alexandria,
- about a dozen from LSU Health Sciences Center
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Okay. That’s enough for now. Info is out there. We can piece it together. We can get an idea I suppose. But in our hearts, we all know.
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Update [2005-9-6 19:42:4 by olivia]: Just saw this on Brad Blog, Funeral director deploys to hurricane region:
A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.
“DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies,” Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.
His partner, Dan Hicks, of Paducah, Ky., was deployed Monday. Buckner, of Dickson, is on standby. Their funeral home is one of several collection sites for donations to be taken to the Red Cross in Fayetteville on Wednesday for transfer to places in need.
The 40,000 estimate does “not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from … mausoleums,” Buckner told the Times-Gazette Monday.
He also said that he believes it will take between 30-120 days to recover all the bodies.
