One of my brothers asked me several days ago how many I thought might be dead. I said, on the low scale, 50,000. It turned out to be his guess as well.
I hope our guesses are wrong.
First we were told hundreds, maybe thousands. Then we were told thousands. Then we were told 5000. Then we were told 10,000. Then the news was that FEMA was delivering 25,000 body bags.
But DMort is telling morticians to prepare for 40,000 bodies.
Tattered Coat encourages others not to turn their faces from the dead, which the government has tried from the beginning to have us do, and continues to do so, exhorting that their focus is on the living, first in search and recovery and then in caring for the living. Though very little care for the living was taken during the evacuations. The White House also says our eyes should be on the future rather than playing a “blame game” focusing on the past and says it is moving forward with help, with assistance, and with an investigation led personally by the president into what went right and what went wrong, and if you’re not for them then you’re against them. That’s what they’re saying when they say you can either step up to their plate and eat what they feed you, or be contentious in your big-little corner of America, because their plan is to walk on by and pay you no mind. Big-little because the polls are saying it’s the majority who believe now things are bad wrong with the president and his response to this crisis.
The dead aren’t the only ones being buried.
They scatter our voices with lime.
What they’re doing is breaking it down into little pieces for manageability. 10 here, 7 there. That’s the policy from day 1. They may acknowledge thousands but thousands is hard for most to absorb, especially when the stories are the bits and pieces. The 7 here, the 10 there, the 4 over there. “Oh, that’s not so bad,” people begin to say psychologically. And in a sense the same has been done with the displaced, split up as they have been, which plays to the benefit of the numbers game, for the longer the survivors look for their loved ones, families and communities broken up as they were during the evacuations, the harder it is to get a count of the missing.
Morticians prep for 40,000 bodies
Corpses piled in convention center freezer – ‘It’s not on, but at least you can shut the door’September 6, 2005
As the water level in much of New Orleans begins to slowly recede, officials are preparing to deal with thousands of dead bodies – bodies floating in contaminated water, hidden in damaged homes and even piled together in the freezer of the city’s convention center.
“DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies,” Dan Buckner, a funeral home director, said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
According to a report in the Shelbyville Times-Gazette of Tennessee, Buckner, co-owner of Gowen-Smith Chapel, and his partner are on their way to the Gulf Coast to help deal with the mounting number of dead.
The 40,000 estimate does “not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from … mausoleums,” Buckner told the paper.
The Dmort teams include morticians, medical examiners, coroners, pathologists, anthropologists, odontologists, dental assistants, photographers, police, DNA, X-ray, evidence, fingerprint, mental health and computer specialists, and others such as heavy-equipment operators.
“Until they search each and every remaining house and remove all the fallen materials … they will not know how many people are there,” Buckner said.
Read the rest at World Net Daily
I think you are right about the piecemeal release of the death toll.
BTW I put up a link to this post–I don’t seem to be able to make trackbacks work.
What they’re doing is breaking it down into little pieces for manageability. 10 here, 7 there. That’s the policy from day 1. They may acknowledge thousands but thousands is hard for most to absorb, especially when the stories are the bits and pieces. The 7 here, the 10 there, the 4 over there. “Oh, that’s not so bad,” people begin to say psychologically. And in a sense the same has been done with the displaced, split up as they have been, which plays to the benefit of the numbers game, for the longer the survivors look for their loved ones, families and communities broken up as they were during the evacuations, the harder it is to get a count of the missing.
so right, Idyllopus. and it applies not just to body counts, but to the entire republican spin machine. they methodically chip away, in bits and pieces, at the truth. and, in the end, all people hear is partisan noise.
but not this time. not this time. we will not let them do it. we can’t let them do it.
As a member of DMORT I can tell you that in any given disaster the local coroner/M.E calls the shots – we basically work for them so if you have a problem with the body count you better give them a call not the white house