To avoid panic? Because they want survivors out first? Because they are rescuing people and not counting bodies yet?
Hundreds feared dead; East Biloxi hit hardest
By ANITA LEE and GREG LACOUR
Sun Herald
Hurricane Katrina cost more lives and destroyed more property than any disaster in Coast history, the Red Cross said Tuesday.
Unprecedented destruction on the Coast and elsewhere will prompt "the largest Red Cross response in the history of the nation," national Red Cross spokesman Peter Teahen said Tuesday.
Hundreds are feared dead, said Biloxi spokesperson Vincent Creel.
"It's going to be much higher than anything we've ever seen," said Jim Pollard, spokesperson for the Harrison County Emergency Management Agency.
Public officials were skittish about relaying fatality numbers because firefighters, other emergency workers and even volunteers navigated mountains of debris Tuesday, finding bodies all along the waterfront.
The hardest hit areas appeared to be the peninsula in East Biloxi, a four-block stretch of the waterfront in Long Beach and low-lying areas of Henderson Point on the west side of Pass Christian.
Rubble was so thick and high that some areas were inaccessible.
In East Biloxi, firefighters and emergency workers pulled bodies from the debris, mostly in areas inaccessible to sightseers. The firefighters tucked the bodies into black bags, laid them on the ground and resumed their search.
Officials were still concentrating on search and rescue missions, looking for survivors that might have been trapped in debris, Tuesday afternoon. As many as 100 rescue vehicles were expected to fill the parking lot at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum, designated a command center for rescue operations.
Actually I heard from a FEMA emergency manager, in the floods in the southeast a few years ago (I can't remember which hurricane), she says that they reported different numbers of dead intentionally so that the count was much lower than actual count.