Some of you may have seen
this article today (and Drudge is flouting it) talking about how statistically insignificant the difference in race was between victims. This is relatively true, but does not tell the whole story. Below is an except from my current research paper on Katrina, taking a look not only at the statistics, but the overall handling of the dead in terms of national priorities.
(I tried to convert all my citations to links, so I hope everything lines up correctly). Cross-posted for extra-crunchy goodness.
More on the flip:
Sunday September 4th saw the end of the evacuation effort and the start of the rescue of the living and the recovery of the dead. While FEMA continued its inept handling of the evacuees, visiting Republican dignitaries continued to provide fodder for the press with their "let them eat cake" remarks. At the same time, another problem was unfolding in New Orleans; the dead were rotting in the streets. The only way to describe the body recovery efforts after September 11 is heroic, as it should have been in the face of our national tragedy. Even though few whole bodies were recoverable, the debris from the towers was triple-sifted to locate every possible body party. A one inch-square bone fragment was located as the only remaining body part of Captain Brian Hickey. "DNA analysis thus has connected miniscule remains to individual casualties. Incredibly, pathologists linked one atomized, male, South Tower employee to more than 200 body parts."That is more than 200 DNA tests for one individual out of 2,801 who died at the Twin Towers. It bespeaks of a Herculean effort to bring closure to the families, to bring closure to a nation in the face of an unspeakable act, without regard to cost. 19,893 remains were recovered from the site, but of that, 12,374 are not identifiable with current DNA technology. The unidentified remains were preserved against future improvements in technology. Four years later, Hurricane Katrina struck, leveling the City of New Orleans as the levies broke in the aftermath. The sudden flooding of the city took hundreds, if not thousands of lives. This was a new national tragedy, the destruction of a coastal city. In the wake of Katrina, more than 6,600 are missing and more than a thousand dead. Of those who are missing, how many are dead, no one knows. We should know, but we do not. One month after the storm had passed on October 3, 2004, the door-to-door search for victims was abandoned, even though not all homes had been searched, nor all areas covered. As people returned to their homes, how ineffective and incomplete that search was became readily apparent. Leila Haydel recently went to the home of 93-year-old Olga Northon, a family friend, even though the house had been checked. She and her husband found the decaying body of the elderly woman in the living room. "I can't tell you how horrible it was to find just the sweetest lady in the world in that situation," Haydel said. Her story is not unique, as residents returned to the 9th Ward, more and more bodies of the elderly, the abandoned were found. Dr. Louis Cataldie, coroner, stated "There are lost people out there that will never be accounted for."Of the over 300 unidentified bodies, 140 or more "carried no ID and have no fingerprints, no recognizable features or marks." It's difficult to imagine that the bodies simply cannot be identified given the work done and the efforts given to identify the bodies of the 9/11 victims four years ago. Its difficult to imagine that thousands of workers sifted rubble to locate pieces of bone that were less than an inch in diameter while entire bodies were missed during door-to-door searches in New Orleans. Around December 6th, Gwendolyn Alexander reported that while she had heard the home of her two best friends had been searched, upon returning to New Orleans, she broke into their house to find their bodies. Alexander: "I had called the Police Department - I had them ride by - they said they came in and nobody was in the house."Checking on her own, Alexander learned that the door had never been opened in the 3 months since the hurricane.The problems with the handling of the dead do not end with incomplete searches. John Karlem Riess, 92, who was Professor Emeritus of Tulane University after seventy years of teaching and mentoring, died during the evacuation on a plane en route to Shreveport, Louisianna. That some elderly would die during an evacuation is an unavoidable fact - evacuations are not gentle and mass transport can be hard on frail bodies like Dr. Riess'. However. he was separated from his sister and loaded into a different evacuation helicopter, despite her protests that she had all of his identification, all of his papers. She was unable to locate him after that.The family lawyer, Stanley Cohn, took over the search, finally contacting the Caddo Parish coroner's office. "An employee told me that he had been cremated - that they had declared him a pauper and without family," Cohn recalled. "I couldn't believe it."The cremation of Dr. Reiss' body took place on October 11th, along with the body of Wilson Williams, who was 82 years old at the time of his death. The fragments of the bodies of the victims of 9/11 were carefully preserved when they could not be identified. "Experts hope eventually to attach names to the mere particles that were once people." Care and concern and dignity were the hallmarks of the handling of human remains after 9/11. Not so for the victims of Katrina.Nine days after the rains stopped, a body was still lying in the middle of Union Street, covered by a tarp. Fifteen days after the rains stopped, Kenyon Services, a division of Service Corporation International (SCI), finally came for Alcede Jackson, his body lying on the front porch. Anyone could see his body from the street, and many did. It cried out for retrieval, lying there under a baby-blue blanket mottled with cigarette burns, a bouquet of dead flowers resting nearby, as 90-degree days came and went.President Bush, on September 6, claimed, "Bureaucracy is not going to get in the way of getting the job done for the people." Yet that is exactly what prevented the timely and dignified retrieval of bodies from New Orleans. Governor Blanco charged on September 12th that FEMA still had not signed a contract with Kenyon International for body recovery. She finally took over negotiations directly to initiate services. There was an utter breakdown in communications between FEMA and state officials, with FEMA promising to supply services and then failing to deliver in a timely fashion. Additionally, internal sniping within the administration as groups attempted to shift blame away from each other increased the response times, as admitted by Frances Fragos Townsend, one of President Bush's chief advisors.Given the supposed planning that had been required by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, how there were not contracts in place with organizations to provide services such as these prior to a disaster is ridiculous. Either it was completely overlooked as a potential issue or it was assumed that evacuated victim's families would somehow be able to locate and secure funeral home services for their family members.The bodies of 9/11 victims were carefully removed from the rubble of the towers, often draped in American flags, while workers stood nearby with caps removed in respect. In New Orleans, bodies lay in the heat to decay and decompose, to be eaten by scavengers. Thebody on Union Street became a street sign. "That body, a black man's, locked in rigor mortis and flanked by traffic cones, became a downtown landmark - as in, turn left at the corpse."The ages of the dead tell a story, and explain a part of the difference between the handling of the September 11 dead and the handling of the Katrina dead. The demographics of 9/11 were what one would expect in the downtown financial district of New York City.The victims were overwhelmingly male (about 74 percent), young (many under 40, most under 50), and white (about 75 percent). Katrina's dead were almost equally split between blacks and whites. Forty-six percent of the victims were black while forty-two percent were white. However, sixty-four percent were over the age of 61. Only a hair more than fifteen percent of New Orleans's population is over age sixty. Alcede Jackson, Olga Northon, Dr. John Riess and Wilson Williams are of different races but of the same age group, over sixty. The elderly face additional challenges in a mandatory evacuation. Many cannot drive or do not own a car. They are often in fragile health, unable to handle long periods of travel or deprivation of food and water such as occured at the Superdome. They rely on public transportation, friends, neighbors, family members, church and social services to get to their medical appointments and to the grocery store. These are problems exacerbated by endemic poverty of the area.