New Orleans coroner wants new searches for Katrina dead
New searches for the remains of people killed by Hurricane Katrina should be performed in light of the recent discovery of bones from Sept. 11 victims in New York, the local coroner said Thursday.
New Orleans coroner Frank Minyard has consistently said he believes that more Katrina victims will be discovered in the vast swaths of flooded out and collapsed homes that haven't yet been demolished across the city, but the recent discovery of hundreds of bone fragments in New York — more than 5 years after the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center — have added urgency to new searches here, he said.
"It woke me up. I was getting a little complacent, saying we got them all," Minyard said in an interview.
Roughly 130 people remain officially missing following the Aug. 29, 2005, storm. Some of the names on the list likely belong to the 33 remains that have been recovered but are not yet identified. Others may belong to people washed out to sea.
More than 1,300 people were killed in Louisiana by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But Minyard believes some bodies are waiting to be discovered in wrecked buildings still.
The most recently discovered body was found in July.
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Minyard hopes volunteers will begin new searches, particularly in heavily flooded eastern New Orleans, early next year.
For months after the storm, firefighters and other officials scoured addresses of those reported missing and performed repeated door-to-door searches in the destroyed Lower 9th Ward, but those searches ended months ago when fire officials were satisfied they had looked everywhere they could.
Minyard believes new searches are necessary in some other areas to ensure that the public and families are confident everything possible was done to find storm victims.
"I know they're going to find bodies. They're going to find remains. I just feel it in my bones," he said. "I'm just trying to avoid what happened in New York.
Related Post:
Hurricane Dislodged Coffins and Scattered Bodies Across Louisiana
NEVER FORGET!
3 comments:
When I watched "When the Levees Broke"it was heartbreaking to see some relatives describing how their loved ones were found much later in the debris of their homes and elsewhere. One young man spoke of finding his mother under a refrigerator after several attempts to find her while water was still in the house. I cried watching that movie. It shouldn't happen here...or anywhere for that matter.
Donnie,
I never trusted the official record of the missing, the body count, the recovery effort. I think thousands more are dead, either nameless, faceless invisible people (the poor and those living totally alone) or entire families. I do hope that Minyard can get those searches on. How can they stop the searches when there is still so much rubble that surely bodies are in that rubble?
There is also the possible people that got washed out to sea. Terrible!
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