Now that the press has been barred from photographing the dead, remaining New Orleans residents are being driven from their homes, and the city is under military rule, it turns out there aren’t so many bodies after all. If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a body floats up from its watery grave, and there are no reporters there to see it, does it exist?
— more philosophical musings below the fold —
Read it and weep.
Death Toll May Be Far Less Than Expected
September 09, 2005 4:21 PM EDT
NEW ORLEANS – Alarming predictions of as many as 10,000 dead in New Orleans may have been greatly exaggerated, with authorities saying Friday that the first street-by-street sweep of the swamped city revealed far fewer corpses than feared.
“Some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred,” said Col. Terry Ebbert, the city’s homeland security chief.
He declined to give a revised estimate. But he added: “Numbers so far are relatively minor as compared to the dire projections of 10,000.”
The encouraging news came as authorities officially shifted most of their attention to counting and removing the dead after spending days cajoling, persuading and all but strong-arming the living into leaving the city because of the danger of fires and disease from the fetid floodwaters…
After the citizens are gone, and the press has been threatened and denied access, who will count our dead?
…the city has now reached a near-saturation level of military and law enforcement. In the areas we visited, the red berets of the 82nd Airborne are visible on just about every block. National Guard soldiers are ubiquitous. At one fire scene, I counted law enforcement personnel (who I presume were on hand to guarantee the safety of the firefighters) from four separate jurisdictions, as far away as Connecticut and Illinois. And tempers are getting hot. While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. The short version is: there won’t be any pictures of this particular group of Guard soldiers on our newscast tonight. Rules (or I suspect in this case an order on a whim) like those do not HELP the palpable feeling that this area is somehow separate from the United States.
At that same fire scene, a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads. Her actions (apparently because she thought reporters were encroaching on the scene) were over the top and she was told. There are automatic weapons and shotguns everywhere you look. It’s a stance that perhaps would have been appropriate during the open lawlessness that has long since ended on most of these streets. Someone else points out on television as I post this: the fact that the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome) is a kind of perverse and perfectly backward postscript to this awful chapter in American history.
So are there really fewer bodies than expected, or are a whole of lot Katrina’s casualties about to slip down the memory hole?
