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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Hurricane fatalities not just the poor

Nicholas Riccardi, Doug Smith and David Zucchino Los Angeles Times

The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city’s poorer districts, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.

The analysis contradicts what swiftly became conventional wisdom in the days after the storm hit – that it was the city’s poorest black residents who bore the brunt of the hurricane. Slightly more than half of the bodies were found in the city’s poorer neighborhoods, with the remainder scattered throughout middle-class and even some richer districts.

“The fascinating thing is that it’s so spread out,” said Joachim Singelmann, director of the Louisiana Population Data Center at Louisiana State University. “It’s not just the Lower Ninth Ward or New Orleans East, which everybody has heard about. It’s across the board, including some well-to-do neighborhoods.”

Because New Orleans was one of the nation’s poorest cities, many of the victims were still found in neighborhoods that were impoverished, by national standards. But by the standards of New Orleans, those neighborhoods were economically stable, and fatalities citywide were distributed with only a slight bias for economic status.

Of the 828 bodies found in New Orleans after the storm, 300 were either recovered from medical facilities or shelters that offer no data on the victim’s socioeconomic status, or from locations that the state cannot fully identify. Of the 528 bodies recovered from identifiable addresses in city neighborhoods, 230 came from areas that had household incomes above the citywide median of $27,133. The poorer areas accounted for 298 bodies.

The state official in charge of identifying Katrina’s victims, Dr. Louis Cataldie, said he was not surprised by the findings. “We went into $1 million and $2 million homes trying to retrieve people,” he said.

The information used in the Times analysis was incomplete, because of difficulties in gathering data in the days after Katrina struck and to bureaucratic problems that followed.

The private company that was contracted to collect bodies was supposed to mark the Global Positioning System coordinates of each recovery, but state officials said they soon determined that data was “worthless.” They had to reconstruct the locations bodies were found, but in some cases could provide information no more specific than “Canal Street.” Although it is the most comprehensive data they have yet released on storm fatalities, state officials acknowledge that the information is still riddled with errors and will likely be corrected constantly over the coming months.

The state data also includes locations such as the interchange of Interstate 10 and Interstate 610, where rescuers in motorboats were directed to deposit bodies they found floating in the floodwaters. There is no way to determine where some of those 19 bodies came from, and all have been excluded from the Times analysis.

“The data you have leaves a lot to be desired,” Cataldie said in an interview Friday. “I don’t know if it’ll ever be 100 percent.”

Of the 1,095 people killed by Katrina in Louisiana, the state has only formally identified and released demographic data on 535. Many other victims are tentatively identified, though 93 remain completely unidentifiable. A couple of bodies are recovered every week, and officials say other victims may have been swept into the Gulf of Mexico, never to be found.

Medical and dental records were destroyed by the storm, and many corpses are so severely decomposed that traditional identification methods like fingerprints are useless.