What the hell happened?

According to the UK Guardian:

Louisiana ready with 25,000 body bags
Mark Oliver and agencies
Thursday September 8, 2005

Rescuers continue to search for survivors in New Orleans.

Emergency officials in Louisiana have 25,000 body bags at hand in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it was revealed today.
Asked if the authorities expected so many bodies, a spokesman for the state's department of health and hospitals said: "We don't know what to expect ... It means we are prepared."

Predictions of the death toll from the hurricane and its repercussions have ranged from a few hundred to 10,000.

From another story:

A total of nearly 40,000 are officially unaccounted for but it is accepted that the vast majority of them have probably either survived the storm or had already left the city without necessarily informing anyone of exactly where they were going.
The figures of those still unaccounted for in this city of just under 500,000 people have been used to draw up a computerised estimate of the dead which is double that of Mr Nagin's. But some believe that the true figure will be far, far smaller, even just in the hundreds.

"The estimates are always far in excess of the reality," said one American reporter who specialises in covering disasters as the rescue operations were coordinated outside Harrahs casino in New Orleans. "I would not be surprised if we were looking at as few 200 to 300."

Such enormous discrepancies are not unusual. When the World Trade Centre was attacked in September 2001, initial estimates of the dead were between 30,000 and 40,000. These were gradually revised down to a figure of 10,000 which was accepted initially as a likely total. In fact, the final figure was fewer than 3,000.

"The honest answer is we just don't know," said a Fema official in Baton Rouge. "All we have to go on is what the official figures are as people are identified. Anything else is a guess."

I'm entirely in accord with this latter sentiment. I remember the huge, overblown estimates on 9/11 myself. I think -- oh, God, I sure hope -- that 25,000 is a huge overstatement. But suddenly, it's at least in the realm of possibility. And that alone is utterly amazing.

I remember following dozens of hurricane stories in my life. As a child, I was fascinated with volcanoes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Hurricanes were particularly interesting because they happened with regularity every summer, and ran their courses over days or weeks with whole cities as their targets, so there was a sense of suspense. And in all that time, I can never remember a hurricane that made landfall in the US where the numbers of the dead ever got into even the mid-range three-digits. I never heard of hundreds of thousands of people being displaced. I never heard of months, seasons, years being projected before a city would be liveable again.

Now you can say that New Orleans is a special case. It's below sea level, on the Gulf, with a huge river running through it.

My response is: New Orleans is a special case. It's below sea level, on the Gulf, with a huge river running through it. And it has been for three hundred years. It's not like people just suddenly noticed that. I was reading this morning that the US Army Corps of Engineers has been planning the upgrade of the levees to withstand a category 5 hurricane since 1965. What the hell happened? There's a record of a funding boon under Clinton in 1995, and that may have helped, but then an 80% cut under Bush. This goddamn war of his. It's ruined Iraq, sent the price of oil skyrocketing, chewed up 2000 American lives and God alone knows how many innocent Iraqi ones, spiked the US deficit and debts to levels from which I cannot realistically imagine they will ever recover, and now this: a famous city of the American homeland, ruined and unliveable for the foreseeable future. Why is this man still in office? If a Democrat had been incumbent and this had happened as a result of a terrorist attack, Congress would be convening to impeach him as we speak -- but all this happened as a result of the actions of this president himself! I didn't think there was this much teflon in the universe! Good God... is there nothing left of the American Constitution? Nothing at all?