![]() One year after Katrina, the state’s medical examiner pledged to keep working until every victim was identified. But that study said the total could be nearly 50 percent higher if deaths possibly linked to the storm were included. Today, when asked about the Louisiana death total, the health department cites a 2008 study that reviewed death certificates and concluded that there were 986 victims. Three months after that, in August 2006, Louisiana counted 1,464 victims, with 135 people still missing. Three months later, it added hundreds of state residents who’d died in other states. Its last news release on the topic, from February 2006, put the statewide toll at 1,103. Gabriel reached a sad milestone: It had released more bodies to victims’ families than the number of bodies it still needed to identify.īy its own admission, Louisiana never finished counting the dead. It was only after two and a half months had passed that St. ![]() “There was a lot of duplication, a lot of poor reporting from the field,” Kelly said in a telephone interview. That’s where most of the bodies of the victims were taken to be identified. After the storm, he worked as a public information officer at DMort’s temporary morgue in St. Don Kelly of the Baton Rouge Police Department had joined a local Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team a month before Katrina. That meant many people weren’t counted until long after they’d died.Īrriving at accurate numbers was difficult. Nearly every day, Bob Johannessen, a spokesman for the state health department, updated the death toll for Louisiana based on the latest data and shared it with the press, taking care never to extrapolate. And each stop could mean the loss of valuable information. The sheer size of the affected areas meant each body might have to go through several checkpoints on its way to the morgue. Kenyon workers had to walk through hospitals where the power had been knocked out. Eventually, procedures were set, with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals taking the lead and Jensen’s company receiving a contract to coordinate the work in the heaviest-hit parishes.Ĭollecting, identifying and counting the dead was an emotionally wrenching, often gruesome, sometimes thankless job. The official effort to recover bodies had stalled as local and federal agencies decided who would do so - and how. “That week was critical, and it was wasted on bureaucracy,” Jensen said in a telephone interview. He’d previously sent around 10 workers to Louisiana to help recover bodies, but they’d been sitting idle in their temporary residence at a Baton Rouge funeral home for a week. He is the CEO of Kenyon International Emergency Services, which helps track deaths after disasters worldwide. Jensen arrived about a week after the storm. Like many post-Katrina efforts, the project to count the dead was hampered by natural and institutional obstacles. News outlets headlined the latest counts of the dead and occasionally showed grisly images of bodies floating in flooded neighborhoods. Although the losses never reached those levels, death in New Orleans was inescapable in the weeks after the levees failed - for its residents, for responders and for a horrified nation. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |