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Fewer Bodies Than Expected Found in Sweeps
NEW ORLEANS - Authorities said Friday that their first systematic sweep of the city found far fewer bodies than expected, suggesting that Hurricane Katrina's death toll may not be the catastrophic 10,000 feared.
"I think there's some encouragement in what we've found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief.
Ebbert declined to give a new estimate of the dead.
Authorities shifted their attention to counting and removing the dead in a grid-by-grid search after spending days persuading and cajoling the living into leaving the shattered city because of the danger of fires and disease from the filthy, corpse-laden floodwaters.