Five weeks after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the bodies of over 1,200 storm casualties have been recovered.
Here's the breakdown of the number of confirmed dead by state:
Lousiana: 972
Mississippi: 221
Florida: 14
Alabama: 2
TOTAL: 1,209
In Louisiana, the search for Hurricane Katrina victims has officially ended. State and federal agencies are not planning any more searches through the New Orleans area in search of the dead, however local authorities will conduct recovery efforts if someone reports seeing a body. Meanwhile, the Arizona Daily Star is
reporting:
A total of six hospitals and 13 nursing homes in Louisiana are under investigation in the deaths of dozens of elderly patients following Katrina, state Attorney General Charles Foti said Monday.
At issue is whether the facilities mishandled evacuations of patients, abandoned them during the devastating storm or euthanized patients to spare them pain when rescuers didn't arrive for days.
At least 140 elderly patients in nursing homes and hospitals died in the storm and its aftermath; dozens more who were living independently may have perished.
Obtaining a number of the missing in the wake of Katrina is a much more tricky job than compiling body counts. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children maintains an updated list of names and information for children either missing or looking for their parents as a result of hurricanes Katrina & Rita.This list has the names of 2,375 children on it as of October 5th.
In Mississippi, a joint task force, led by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation is in charge of compiling a list of the missing. Five weeks after Katrina, about 100 persons remain unaccounted for. The list began with almost 700 names on it, but officials were able to locate about 600 of the people on the list. I know of no similar effort in Louisiana to compile a comprehensive list of the missing.
The ratio of missing to dead in Mississippi is 100/221=45%. Applying this ratio to the Louisiana confirmed dead numbers, we have : .45x972=437. So, there may be about 437 missing as a result of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Combining the Louisiana and Mississippi numbers, there may be 100+437=537 people missing in those two states. Expect this number to decline as some of those missing people are located.