[cardinal4]

Gov. Kathleen Blanco said she expected the death toll to reach the thousands, while Craig Vanderwagen, rear admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service, said one morgue alone, at a St. Gabriel prison, expected 1,000 to 2,000 bodies.

What does this mean?

[markomalley]

PHS has a uniformed service. They use navy-style ranks.

[Dog]

Thousands dead...thousands.

[HoustonCurmudgeon]

The United States has six uniformed services, five of them are armed services, the sixth is the Public Health Service.

[gandalftb]

Latest report on demographics, given the known popoulation of the areas sustaining over a 5 foot storm surge, 75,000 people are unaccounted for in shelters or on the ground. Many of course left town and are with friends and family and can't be accounted for yet.

Still, there will likely be many more than a few thousand deaths. Two of the dead are New Orleans police officers that committed suicide.

The weather channel's top hurricane expert predicted this devastation 12 hours before Katrina made land. I saw his report and he said that the barometric pressure was much lower than Camille and was a record low. He said also that the physical size of the storm meant that the water surge would last much longer than people could survive. FEMA was warned, many kinds of aid should have been dispatched days earlier.

All of the cruise liner, Navy hospital ships, Marine assets, hovercraft, and rescue ships should have left Norfolk as soon as Katrina went level 4. All of those ships could have been 12 hours behind the eye following from the south of a known-to-travel-only-north hurricane.

Posse Commitatus doesn't apply to evacuation and medical assistance. FEMA/our administration blew it. The Coast Guard however threw all their assets in early on, before it hit, they were ready and are real heroes in this mess.