NOLA :: Who Floated >10k Deaths & 25k Body Bags? Dutch Assist ¶ Update

Mayor: Katrina Death Toll May Hit 10,000
ABC News – Sep 05 11:30 AM
New Orleans Parish Residents Return Home; Mayor Says Hurricane Katrina Death Toll May Hit 10,000

[ABC News link not active – took a Reuters link instead – Oui]

In diary by Jerôme a Pàris is mentioned De Boer was involved in setting up morgue facility after London bombings. I searched for any link in UK, I haven’t found any info. Begin to think this was bogus, false information. As I added comment to diary: De Boer delivers accommodations – NOT morgues.

MY CONCLUSION :: ALL HEADLINES IRRESPONSIBLE for suggestion up to 25,000 dead!

These statements add to FEAR, please corroborate stories first before publication. A rovian tactic?

CNNi – Katrina Disaster

FEMA Sept. 2 – Four Emergency Morgue Units Sent to Disaster Area

WASHINGTON (AP) Sept. 2, 2005 — The U.S government is sending four mobile morgues to the area struck by Hurricane Katrina. One unit is working in Louisiana and the other three are en route or in staging areas, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Friday.

The death toll in the storm remains uncertain but officials have said it could be hundreds or thousands.
.
Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Teams — known as DMORT — are made up of civilian volunteers who provide victim identification and mortuary services. The teams set up temporary morgue facilities and handle body preparation and disposal of remains.

Organized under FEMA, the teams work under direction of local authorities during an emergency.

They include funeral directors, medical examiners, coroners, pathologists, forensic anthropologists, medical records technicians and transcribers, finger print specialists, forensic dental experts, dental assistants, x-ray technicians, mental health specialists, computer professionals, administrative support staff and security and investigative personnel.

[Links and bold emphasis added are mine – Oui]

100 People Died at a Dockside Warehouse

Police, Soldiers Go Door to Door Urging New Orleans Residents to Leave Dangerously Polluted City

NEW ORLEANS Sept. 8, 2005 — Marty Bahamonde, a FEMA spokesman, said the agency has hired a contractor to help remove bodies in the expectation that there may be large numbers of corpses.

“Nobody has any numbers or anything they’re going by other than guesswork,” Bahamonde said.

The enormity of the disaster came ever-clearer in neighboring St. Bernard Parish, which was hit by a levee break that brought a wall of water up to 20 feet high. State Rep. Nita Hutter said 30 people died at a flooded nursing home in Chalmette when the staff left the elderly residents behind in their beds. And Rep. Charlie Melancon said more than 100 people died at a dockside warehouse while they waited for rescuers to ferry them to safety.

[…]

25,000 Extra Body Bags are Flown In

Meanwhile, the firm of Kenyon Worldwide Disaster Management has been hired by FEMA to coordinate the recovery of bodies in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes.

Images of the dead Stern.de

Life's End Marked "X"   

IT’S LORD OF THE FLIES IN LOUISIANA

            … it’s not human nature  

R.I.P. May all these brave Americans meet their creator and rest in peace.
Their deaths demand accountability and Justice!  

A Small Ray of Hope: Death Toll Not So Dire
by Bruce Nolan, Staff writer (Nola.com)

Eleven days after Hurricane Katrina plunged New Orleans into agonies of flood, panic and chaotic evacuation, authorities finally began searching house-to-house in once-flooded neighborhoods Friday for those who did not escape.

Early results retrieved far fewer bodies than officials expected.

That led one key official to hope the death toll might be much less than 10,000, Mayor Ray Nagin’s early estimate that quickly became an unchallenged benchmark.

That figure was based on the speed with which Hurricane Katrina flooded the Lower 9th Ward and other poor, densely populated neighborhoods as the storm roared past on Aug. 29 with winds of at least 105 mph.

Riverbend – Lower 9th Ward  

The estimate became more credible as thousands of traumatized refugees slogged into the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center during the next two days, bearing nightmarish tales of pushing bloated bodies out of the way or passing them sprawled on rooftops.

But in the first day of organized searching, there seemed some reason for hope. “I think there’s some encouragement in what we found in the initial sweeps, that some of the catastrophic death that some people predicted may not, in fact, have occurred, The numbers so far are relatively minor, as compared to the dire predictions of 10,000,” said Terry Ebbert, chief of homeland security for the city.

At least in the Lower 9th Ward, federal, state and local teams along with officers from all over the country broke open doors and entered homes, calling out for survivors and looking for corpses.

Where they found neither, they scrawled “0-0” on the house and moved on.

Excellent historic site –
must read ::
Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Snapshot

Signs of Life Appearing in New Orleans

Downtown New Orleans is shown in this aerial view today.  
AP Photo/David J. Phillip

NEW ORLEANS (AP) Sept. 10, 2005 — A woman waters her mint plants outside her house. A man rides his bicycle on a levee. A newspaper truck lumbers down the road, the passenger handing out papers. In this battered, flooded city, a few signs of normalcy have flickered defiantly in recent days.

IEM, FEMA, and Hurricane Pam: I was there ◊ by suspect device @dKos

      Originally posted ◊ at Suspect Device Blog

You may have seen mention of the “Hurricane Pam” exercise in press coverage of Louisiana’s emergency preparedness, or lack thereof. I used to work for IEM and was at the Hurricane Pam exercise.

As with most IEM projects, the Hurricane Pam exercise was put together at the last minute, in a blind animal panic with no time for refinement, testing, or subtlety, but it still was a remarkable and bold idea.

There were contracts in place with major vendors across the country, and prestaging areas were already determined. […] this is one reason FEMA has rejected large donation and turned back freelance shipments of water, medical supplies, food, etc: they have contracts in place to purchase those items, and accepting the same product from another source could be construed as breach of contract. This could lead to contract cancellation, thus removing a reliable source of product from the pool of available resources. … but the reasoning is that if they accept five semis of water from the east Weewau, Wisconsin, Chamber of Commerce, the water supplier, who is contractually bound to provide 100,000 gallons per day will be freed from that obligation.

So: Louisiana did have a hurricane plan (pdf file), but was devising a new one, to be based on recommendation from the people who would actually be doing the work. The need to evacuate people from impact areas, including those without transportation or the means to obtain it, was discussed, despite media assertions to the contrary.