KATRINA'S REAL DEATH TOLL NEVER REVEALED BY FED GOV'T (DEPOPULATION)

KATRINA'S REAL DEATH TOLL NEVER REVEALED BY FED GOV'T (DEPOPULATION):

MOST OF KATRINA'S DEAD WERE POOR & BLACK.


Sources: US News, YouTube


***** No One Knows How Many People Died in Katrina


Ten years after the third-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, we still don't know how many people died because of it. We'll never know for certain how many people died in Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

The problems are inherent in the confusion of disasters, especially those involving multiple states and various local, state and federal agencies.

Inquires to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and The Department of Health in Louisiana led U.S. News to a 2008 report as the most accurate and updated source of information. The report was years in the making as deaths were investigated and missing persons were located. In an effort to cut down on the confusion among agencies, the report reviewed all available death databases to attempt the impossible: an accurate count of Katrina's victims in Louisiana.

Although 1,833 is an often-cited mortality figure, it is older than figures in the report and none of the agencies we spoke to claimed it as an accurate estimate of the final death toll, as FiveThirtyEight also reported.

The most likely cause of death was drowning. The victims of the storm were often black and skewed older. In Orleans Parish, where 70 percent of the victims counted in the study died, the mortality rate for black adults was 1.7 times to 4 times higher than the mortality rate for white adults.

Forty percent of victims were aged 75 or older, which further complicated the process of counting victims. Many of the deceased had serious preexisting medical conditions. It's impossible to know if the person would have died from those conditions if the storm hadn't occurred or if the storm exacerbated medical conditions enough to cause death.

"If an evacuee died after a heart attack two months following the storm, was that death attributable to Katrina?" says John Ford of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

The researchers confirmed 986 victims (including 15 deaths from Louisiana evacuees in other states), but called the estimate "conservative." The higher estimate for deaths in Louisiana was 1,440.

This graphic shows the conservative estimate, including the staggering impact on the elderly population. While the number of people who died in Hurricane Katrina is likely much higher, even the lower bound shows the devastating impact of a huge storm that New Orleans was ill-equipped to handle.

While the death toll in the study is 986, the total in the graphic is slightly lower because it doesn't include the 15 deaths from other states or the 22 deaths for which age information was not available.