Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Getting A Handle On The Number Of Dead

I sat down overnight to try to come up with a rough estimate of the number of dead in the Gulf Coast. I came up with about 25,000. DMORT, the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, has been told to expect 40,000 bodies. I was using census numbers that are six years old and calculated guesses for variables, so I suppose 40,000 is possible, but I would still have to say unlikely.

By the way, our worst national tragedy ever didn't get the president to order our flag flown at half staff, Rhenquist's death did.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

While it is neither funny nor sarcastic... our flags around Columbus have been down since the Lima Company deaths. We can't pull far enough from death to even raise them... and it keeps coming.