New Orleans: 972 Dead, 8000 Dead - What's the difference?

[SpursWoman]

That being said I do feel that President Bush should have visited the area sooner and down on the ground not by air.

You feel it was necessary to pull badly needed resources away from the rescue effort for a presidential visit?

[JoeChalupa]

You feel it was necessary to pull badly needed resources away from the rescue effort for a presidential visit?

Good point. But from what I've learned it wasn't like badly needed resources were pouring in but anyways I'm just saying it wasn't like Bush to wait so long is my point. I guess I was just expecting the Bush that I have come to know to have responded in a more personal way.
Oh well. Kay sarah, kay sarah.

[Aggie Hoopsfan]

I'm gonna put that one right up there with all the Al Jazeera bull saying 20,000 US troops are dead and Bush is just hiding it from us all.

Guess he silenced the families too...

[Nbadan]

I'm gonna put that one right up there with all the Al Jazeera bull saying 20,000 US troops are dead and Bush is just hiding it from us all.

Guess he silenced the families too...

He's not hiding them silly, they are being cared for by the illuminati on UFOs.

Seriously, only those troops that die in Iraq are counted. Those that are injured in Iraq, but die on the way to Germany and/or back to the U.S. aren't counted.

I think the 8000 dead figure in the original article has been debunked as a misprint between the web edition of the story and the print version of the newspaper, so, the original number was 800 corpses. There, everyone can rest easy now.

[cecil collins]

You feel it was necessary to pull badly needed resources away from the rescue effort for a presidential visit?

They did at some point anyway, so why not sooner? Either way, I think his visiting the site is overrated, and mostly a chance for him to pretend he gives a damn. Everyone ed up to a degree, and it makes no sense for anyone on the outside looking in to act like they know who's fault it was. I just hope Bush doesn't try to prevent this investigation.

[RandomGuy]

Not really ... I think it's his job to some degree, at least to show that he knows what's going on. Although since security for the POTUS drains a lot of local resources that they didn't have near enough of to begin with, it would have been foolish for him to go there until the area was more secure.

The area was plenty secure. Surprisingly enough the reports of widepsread mayhem were greatly exaggarated.

[RandomGuy]

I found the discreptency.

Follow the link provided in the first post and read the source article.

Cataldie, a former medical examiner, acknowledged that identifying and releasing bodies has been painfully slow. Of the nearly 800 bodies taken to the morgue, he said, just 32 have been identified positively and another 340 have been identified tentatively.

Dan added an extra zero by mistake.

In his defense he may have been thinking about this number:

A Category 4 storm killed an estimated 8,000 people in Galveston, Texas, in 1900. Another storm killed 1,836 people in South Florida 28 years later.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/28/katrina.dead/

Either way, it is a tragedy.