Katrina Coverage

Unless someone reports something, they've stopped counting in Louisiana:

State and federal agencies have finished their sweeps through the city, but Kenyon International Emergency Services, the private company hired by the state to remove the bodies, is on call if any other body is found, said Bob Johannessen, a spokesman with the state Department of Health and Hospitals…

Last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had completed its role in the search because its specialties were no longer needed, including getting to bodies in attics or other hard-to-reach places or in buildings that may be structurally unsound.

FEMA did nearly 23,000 thorough room-to-room searches in New Orleans with about a dozen teams of emergency workers…

See also "Families Lose Loved Ones Again — in a Bureaucratic Mire":

…A month after Katrina upended the lives of hundreds of thousands, families of the dead have been traumatized again by the ordeal of trying to pry their loved ones' bodies from a bureaucratic quagmire. They say they have spent weeks being rebuffed or ignored by state and federal officials at a massive temporary morgue that houses hundreds of decomposed corpses…

…[The state official in charge of the morgue, Dr. Louis Cataldie], a former medical examiner, acknowledged that identifying and releasing bodies had been painfully slow. Of more than 800 bodies delivered to the St. Gabriel morgue, he said, 32 have been positively identified and 340 have been tentatively identified…

"I'm a professional in the business, a licensed funeral director, and they won't tell me anything," [someone else] said. "It's ridiculous how secretive they are."

Now, for the questions the MSM should be asking but isn't, let's turn to, yes, the DUmmies:

Sep 30 Katrina Officially missing 10,417; Officially dead 935 LA, 221 MS

The numbers are not in the "dead' but the "missing'

What is the actual Bush body count in New Orleans and…

Also, "Many listed as missing may not be after all":

About 2,500 people are still listed as missing or unaccounted for more than a month after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. But fortunately, the numbers are misleading, according to Larry Upchurch, deputy director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Upchurch said he is confident the vast majority of people on the list - most of them children - have been reunited or at least been in contact with their loved ones, although officials haven't been notified.

The 9/29 LAT article "Katrina's Corpses Are Many, IDs Are Few" (also here and here) appears to be the predecessor to the above LAT article, and, oddly enough, it contains this:

With 10 bodies recovered Tuesday, officials said, the number of flood victims in the state Wednesday was 896. Just more than 100 bodies were turned over to local coroners and are not included in the tally at the temporary morgue.

Also odd, the Concord Monitor version of the LAT article, entitled "Loss of bodies adds to grief of many families", contains this:

Cataldie, a former medical examiner, acknowledged that identifying and releasing bodies has been painfully slow. Of the nearly 8,000 bodies taken to the morgue, he said, just 32 have been identified positively and another 340 have been identified tentatively.

What an odd typo to make. Is that what it said in the original LAT article, and the LAT changed it? Or, did the CM change it, then add the comma to the number? I'll ask: news *at* cmonitor.com

UPDATE: The NYT's "Weeks Later, Most Storm Victims Lie Unnamed" doesn't have much more beyond what's above.

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