New Orleans myths: The numbers tell a different story

From The American Thinker:

September 6th, 2005

There will be plenty of time to argue about who was responsible for the slow response in New Orleans this week in dealing with those who did not choose to leave, or were unable to leave the city before the hurricane hit. The catastrophe that followed, when the levees gave way, and 80% of the city, and many of the surrounding suburbs flooded, was far worse than the hurricane itself. Already many seem to have forgotten that New Orleans officials thought they had escaped Katina’s wrath as the storm moved north from the Gulf on Monday, prior to the levees giving way.

The nation will have to deal with an extraordinary human tragedy now, with well over a million people displaced, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost on the Gulf Coast, and a cleanup and recovery process that will take many months in New Orleans and Mississippi. This of course has not prevented major broadcast media, from Brian Williams to Bob Schieffer to Tim Russert, from angrily demanding answers for why the show of federal force came 48 hours later in New Orleans than it might have.

Almost everybody now agrees that things changed dramatically on the ground over the weekend. Almost all people in the two big holding centers of the Super Dome and Convention Center have been evacuated, and the lawlessness on the streets has ebbed a bit. Some estimates are that New Orleans is now a ghost town, with fewer than 1,000 residents left of its nearly half million population.

Certainly the human tragedy in the city is and has been gruesome - in the Super Dome alone there were at least 6 murders, and 12 rapes among the enclosed evacuees, and bodies have been seen floating in the flooded streets of the city. The death toll is unknown, possibly in the thousands, and illness afflicting some of those who survived, but were living in or around stagnant and polluted waters will take a further toll over time.

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