Damn.
THE NOPD who stayed and fought the vermin sure arent getting much media air time.
Jeffers have you read # 1684?
I know you had some estimates on the possible death toll earler, but I was wondering if you think 60k is possible.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-me-arrive5sep05,1,3363369.story?page=1&coll=la-tot-promo
There was the free trip across country in a private jet. And there was the complimentary bottle of water — wonderfully ice-cold water — handed to her upon her arrival.
Elaine West savored them both Sunday as she helped lead the first trickle of what could become a wave of survivors of Hurricane Katrina into California.
"I think I might stay here," said the grateful 52-year-old former candy maker as she surveyed Los Angeles from a hilltop next to the Hollywood Freeway.
She quietly told of being driven out of her Uptown New Orleans home, not by rising floodwaters but by vandals who looted her neighborhood and by gunfire that killed two of her neighbors.
"I don't see myself ever going back to New Orleans again," she said. "Even to visit."
The math I posted earlier hasn't and can't change. The assumptions can though, a big one being that people are hard to kill. They hold onto trees for hours, they come out of newly chopped roof holes wearing backpacks and looking clean, they swim through gasoline, and they endure and survive sub-animal conditions in places like the CC and dome, complaining but alive.
That said, I'm sticking with those numbers, 40-400k.
I'm hearing noises from Biloxi that the count there will top out soon, with current count in the 200 range. If true, I will revise earlier estimates downward, but I don't think this optimism is justified just yet.
Still almost no word from Long Beach, St. Louis Bay et al, Pass Christian, Slidell, Plaqemines Parish, St. Bernard Parish or east Orleans Parish, the areas hardest hit. Ditto Moss, Pascagoula and Gautier, which are outside what I'm calling the black hole, those areas straddling the eye's center track.
Sure, the focus on NO could be blocking those reports out, and then again, maybe there just isn't enough knowlege yet to report on.
I will take this opp to point up the need for anything, even anecdotal reports, from those areas, because the NO media blitz may be divertig our attention from an oncoming blindside.