There are dozens and dozens of postings on petfinder by people who said the same thing. Then they needed to be rescued by helicopter. They were not allowed to take their pets with them.
If they had not been there in the first place, then the time spent rescuing them could have been spent rescuing someone else - perhaps someone infirm. That's not conjecture, that's fact. The only conjecture is that some people may have died because valuable rescue resources were spent rescuing healthy, able-bodied people who stayed behind BECAUSE of their pets. But it is not conjecture that some people died when they stayed behind due to their pets.
**(In my opinion, they should have taken their pets with them and slept in their cars if necessary, since they expected it would be 2 days at the most. But that's a separate topic altogether.)
"But it is not conjecture that some people died when they stayed behind due to their pets."
And all these years, I thought Darwin was wrong. Oh well, the gene pool needs a good purge every now and then.