(NEW ORLEANS) Hurricane Katrina is still killing people nearly two years later. Yes, people are still dying from her two years later.
And although it’s much, much rarer of late, every once-in-a-while in the Greater New Orleans Metropolitan area after Hurricane Katrina, there have been reports of another person’s body being found in an attic or some place else that succumbed to the wrath of Hurricane Katrina.
As late as eight months after Hurricane Katrina leveled most everything a couple of hundred miles east and west of the Louisiana/Mississippi state lines, people were still being found. And what’s even more disturbing, respectfully, is that some victim’s bodies have never been found some two years later, presumably washed out to sea or any of a whole host of other unthinkable, yet very real possibilities.
However, what has largely gone unreported is the people who are dying still, nearly two years later, from the psychological effects or health problems directly related to Hurricane Katrina, namely, suicides or pre-existing medical conditions worsened to the point of death from living in sub-standard conditions, or quite simply but no less tragic, a broken heart. (See, Families Blame More Deaths on Katrina, CBS News, by Michelle Roberts)
That’s not to speak of the murder statistics that could certainly be counted toward that number, in that they differ in how they’ve come about after Hurricane Katrina compared to the murder statistics and how they came about prior to the hurricane.
In other words, while deaths by murder after Hurricane Katrina aren’t tallied and officially attributed to the hurricane, ask anybody with a measure of knowledge about the New Orleans criminal landscape, from both before and after the hurricane, and they’ll point to any of a number of murder cases, and overall crime for that matter, that has happened as a result of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Case in point, filmmaker Helen Hill was murdered inside of her home after she and her husband Dr. Hill returned to the city to start their part in the re-building process. (See, A Murder Shakes Confidence in New Orleans, NPR Commentary, by David Koen)
Would they have suffered the fate they did had not the hurricane caused the crime scene in New Orleans to change the way it did? Most persons familiar with them and the New Orleans scene strenuously say NO-they would not have become the target of a night prowler trolling the unlit and under-manned streets of New Orleans in order to prey on those he felt, consciously or sub-consciously, were more out of reach of the protection of law enforcement.
Wide-open voids and large swaths of neighborhoods that have been laid to waste as a result of Hurricane Katrina make for easy pickings in the criminally-minded.
One resident I asked that moved to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, as so many have after Hurricane Katrina, had this to say about the “new crime” that moved in after everybody moved out. “It used to be that you knew which areas you just didn’t go in to, and crime pretty much stayed in the same pockets of the city it had been in for umpteen years. But after Hurricane Katrina, it was like the wild, wild west anywhere you went throughout the city. Criminals from around the country, and probably some of those originally from the city returned and, acted like it was a free-for-all playground for all of their criminal activities.”
New Orleans Police officers, who are some of the toughest in the nation when it comes to crowd control and big city crime, have also voiced their observations on the matter essentially having said, it’s a new criminal psyche, new drug dealers not from the area have moved in along with some of the old from the area which have returned, and old and new turfs are being fought over because of the change in the population landscape caused by Hurricane Katrina.
It used to be the police department at least had a rough handle on who was who, and who did what where. Now though, it’s harder to tell why a certain person may have been murdered or who may be responsible for it.
The New Orleans Police Dept. now seems to be crippled, right along with the justice system in New Orleans. It’s as if they are ‘dying’ in their jobs as police officers. With the justice system in New Orleans not administering as it should, they’re working with cuffs on their own hands. The very antithesis of what makes a police officer of the law, a police officer, is his ability to enforce the law by cuffing the hands of the breakers of the law, not working as if with cuffs on their own hands.
While Judges and District Attorneys have made attempts to get together on the same docket of justice in serving New Orleans, they along with the police officers have essentially been ‘dead’ in the water ever since Hurricane Katrina.
But what about federal, state, and city officials and politicians, as well as others, how do they see the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its’ prolonged death-dealing effect on citizens of New Orleans?
According to a report filed by the Associated Press in Editor and Publisher Journal, Newspaper’s Death Notices Suggest Toll from Katrina Still Rising, long-time Orleans Parish coroner Dr. Frank Minyard recently said, “There is no doubt in my mind that Katrina is still killing our residents.” He went on to elaborate, saying what many in the New Orleans area are concurring with, “People with pre-existing conditions that are made worse by the stress of living here after the storm. Old people who are just giving up. People who are killing themselves because they feel they can’t go on.”
The largest local newspaper, The Times Picayune, sheds some light on the issue as well. Before Hurricane Katrina, the obituary column was just that, essentially a column. However after the hurricane, and after the initial surge of deaths recorded in the newspaper as a direct result of Hurricane Katrina, on any given day, the paper records for its’ readers seemingly plenty more death notices after Hurricane Katrina than before the storm.
Dr. Kevin Stephens Sr., director of the New Orleans Health Department said, he has analyzed the death-notice pattern in the newspaper from before and after the storm and said, he believes it confirms more local people are dying since the hurricane than on average from before the hurricane.
Some have argued that since many New Orleans churches are no longer publishing their news bulletins, which carried their parishioner’s death notices in them, this is partly the reason that the newspaper’s obituary has more entries still two years after the hurricane as compared to before the hurricane.
But Dr. Stephens discounted that as a possible explanation for the increased death notices in the newspaper saying, it was routine to place death notices in both the newspaper and other outlets such as a church bulletin or newsletter prior to the hurricane.
His study will be published this month in the Journal of Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, the American Medical Association’s new publication on disaster management.
Why is this many more deaths occurring in a city with a reduced population? Is there any official position on whether or not there is an increase in deaths when comparing numbers and getting the percentages thereof from before and after the hurricane?
The Louisiana State Dept. of Health and the City of New Orleans Health Dept. are at odds over the increase of deaths during the period of January 2006 through June 2006, a period of six to nine months after Hurricane Katrina paralyzed the Gulf Coast.
The state Dept. of Health is reporting a “slight” increase in deaths during that period. Dr. Raoult Ratard, the state epidemiologist said, “The only slight increase” in deaths in New Orleans was primarily during the months of January 2006 through March 2006. The numbers for that particular time period coming out of the state epidemiologist’s office show a “slight increase” of 11.3 deaths per 1000 deaths to 14.3 deaths per 1000 deaths.
The city’s response would certainly seem to indicate their diverging position saying; the state’s health department is minimizing, or at least not accurately reflecting the real number of deaths as a result of Hurricane Katrina.
City officials strongly disagree with even using the state’s numbers but, even when doing so, they say an increase of 25%, 11.3 to 14.3, is anything but “slight.” “Our death rate was already high, that’s huge,” said Dr. Stephens.
“We are starting from a mortality rate of 11, when it should have been closer to the national average(8),” he said. “Now we are at 14.3, and that is sky-high,” in the Times Picayune, Katrina Death Rates Murky, by Kate Moran.New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is backing the city’s findings and accounting of deaths attributed to Hurricane Katrina.
Additionally, the city and the state’s numbers aren’t added up the same way. The state doesn’t take into account evacuees who died while whittling away to nothing, in a place not their home and, waiting on a return to New Orleans that would never happen. And I say that with all respect for the family members who, no doubt, were right there trying to make something happen in the middle of those extenuating circumstances to bring some sense of normalcy back into the lives of the deceased loved ones.
Conversely, the city takes a more familial view of its citizens and does take these numbers into account. If one of her citizens has died since waiting on his or her return to New Orleans, the city counts that towards the Hurricane Katrina death toll.
The city’s total number of deaths, notwithstanding those citizens that have died outside of the state lines, and for which the city has collected and continues to collect data on these New Orleans citizens, is more than the state’s total number of deaths because the city has taken into account these very citizens, while the state hasn’t.
The happy medium that some experts refer to when trying to calculate deaths of displaced individuals that can be directly attributable to Hurricane Katrina is to answer these questions and others; did the displaced victim look at his or her new set of circumstances after Hurricane Katrina and start a new life from there? Or did the displaced die while waiting to return to New Orleans?
The former wouldn’t qualify the individual for inclusion in the total number of deaths attributable to Hurricane Katrina, since they made the decision to start a new way of life. Whereas the latter would since, even though living in another city, the deceased still declared their continued citizenship to New Orleans even though dying by waiting on their return to New Orleans.
Did the displaced victim have a pre-existing medical condition which was exacerbated to the point of death by worsened conditions endured after their initially surviving the hurricane? If so, their death is attributable to Hurricane Katrina. What about the souls which have committed suicide after the hurricane?
Dr. Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and head of a group that has monitored 3,000 exiled Katrina survivors, said reconstructing an individual’s mental and physical state before death might help in determining exact causes of death.
“There are high rates of mental health problems among the survivors and previous research has found that mental disorders are predictors of earlier death rates,” Kessler said. “So putting the two together in New Orleans is not surprising.”
What is surprising and perplexing to many persons, is Dr. Ratard’s seemingly minimizing of the reality of the death-toll situation in New Orleans, since he doesn’t really seem to think New Orleans had an increase in suicides after Hurricane Katrina, saying any additional deaths since then could simply be more of a “chance” than an actual increase in suicides.
According to an AP report filed in the Boston Globe, New Orleans suicide rate may be up, in speaking about the data he’s collected and interpreted, which shows the percentage difference in suicides from before and after the storm, Dr. Ratard says “They (amount of suicide-deaths) are not big enough so that you can say with certainty that it would not be due to chance.”
Essentially he’s taking the position that the increase in suicides after the hurricane may be due more to chance than any other trouble-filled and/or burdensome factors.
Most persons I talked to on the ground disagree. Common-sense amongst the populace says people have given up due to the extreme anxiety and/or depression as a result of Hurricane Katrina. His position also would seem to rule out the obvious copious increases in alcohol and drug consumption or abuse, extreme financial pressures, or any of the other added reasons and contributing factors residents of New Orleans may have decided to ‘end their life’ after Hurricane Katrina.
Suicides that have come about as a result of financial pressures, or the loss of dearly loved ones in the hurricane, are just a couple of primary reasons some are saying relatives or friends have committed suicide in the wake of Katrina.
The reduced numbers of mental health professionals in the city say they are encountering more people with psychological problems stemming from Hurricane Katrina.
We’re seeing triple the number of people with mental health problems as we were before Katrina,” said Leah Hedrick, social worker at Ochsner Hospital. “Depression, suicidal, anxiety, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and along with that comes a lot more physical problems.”
However, some argue that is because the open hospitals are taking on a larger number of patients due to the other hospitals still being closed. And while it is true, some hospitals still remain closed after Katrina, it would be hard to definitively claim that the increase in patients with mental health problems being seen in the open hospitals is a direct result of another hospital not being open yet to see them, especially considering the reduced population figures.
Either way no data comparing these numbers was prepared for this article. Yet it isn’t a stretch to realize the resultant conditions on the average citizen of New Orleans, having gone through all that they did and still do, are conditions that, for some, are mentally problematic. Many in New Orleans have since been whipped ‘to death,’ mentally.
Then there is the slow death many have been enduring since Hurricane Katrina.
Remember, residents only were officially allowed to start returning back to their water and wind damaged homes about three weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, and then, only to have to turn right back around. Hurricane Rita was now threatening New Orleans, and the Mayor called another mandatory evacuation of the city.
After Hurricane Rita passed on New Orleans, although some comparatively minor flooding did occur as a result of her in New Orleans, the city essentially stayed abandoned for about six months.
Ask anybody from the greater New Orleans metro area and, all along the affected Gulf Coast to tell you about September 2005. Most anybody, if not everybody will tell you the same thing, “What September, we totally lost that month. There was no September 2005.”
The suburbs of New Orleans were on their way to rebuilding around her, but as for New Orleans herself, she would remain like a used empty shell, washed up on the shore, without any real life in her for the next six months.
And before anybody in the city, or anybody familiar with how she felt, could muster up enough air to declare that some largely intangible corner had been turned in her efforts to rise up from out of her grave, and out from underneath all of Hurricane Katrina’s debris, she suffered death after death, both metaphorically and realistically through the six-month mark.
Yet many, many folks still hadn’t even been back to see the city by the time the six month mark rolled around. And even then, those that were making somewhat regular trips back and forth into the Greater New Orleans Metro area, were only doing just that, making trips as they could, to make what progress was possible, in an atmosphere where everything was surreal, because nothing about New Orleans was the same. Everybody’s lives had been turned upside down, and whatever former life they had had, that was dead to them now and buried under all of that debris.
That’s all pretty much anybody said while trying to crawl back to life out from underneath the debris, and while cleaning up each others’ families’ homes during those first six months, “Man look at all of this stuff!” And the oft-added, “This is an unbelievable! Look at the amount of damage and work that needs to be done.”
Add to that many people’s rhetoric, “where do I go from here, without the money, the man power, the will, the know-how, the life I once had in New Orleans?”-and you begin to see many persons certainly felt so weighted down, that they may as well have been covered under six-feet of dirt.
Top that with the shortage of building materials and contractors, delay after delay with insurance companies, and the delay with every other connect you had to make in order to pull it all back together again, and before you know it another year has passed by.
During all of this time, it must be remembered too, the great majority of New Orleans residents are still in limbo as to what course of action they can or will take regarding coming back at all. Many in reality were neither her nor there, i.e., not really living wherever they were located at the time, nor living in their beloved New Orleans. In other words, they really weren’t ‘living’ (anywhere) at all.
From the federal level down to the individual, everybody was wondering how life would really start again in earnest. With every possible bad scenario that could happen, already having been realized, the city looked and sounded more like a city scorned and hurting all over, rather than a city ready to pick itself up onto its feet and get back into the game of life.
The radio airwaves were filled with howls and tears. The talk on everybody’s lips was not only who, if anybody, was to blame, but how do we climb out of this mess? How do we start living again?
All sorts of matters pertaining to all kinds of decisions were being discussed. Everything from, will I ever be able to identify my loved one since the makeshift morgue up the river still hadn’t properly identified all hurricane victims or, where will I bury my loved one since many of the city’s burial grounds have been upset and funeral parlor owners are in a disarray themselves for the most part.
Down to, how do I extract myself from New Orleans now that I’ve decided not to stay and try and rebuild or, should I move away for a couple of years and come back after it’s rebuilt, if it’s even rebuilt by then?
And all the never-ending questions in between covering the gamut from population shifts to insurance claims and beyond.
The not-so-surprising part of it, whether a New Orleanian was able to arrive at a decision and had decided to move on, or had decided to quit crying about all of the spilled milk Katrina caused, and went ahead and tackled the rebuilding at hand head-on to try and get back to as normal a life as could be had after the hurricane; the sick, deathly smell of New Orleans still kept a hold of you, keeping you in limbo because of her completely dead areas throughout the city, and generally sickly, slow recovery, so that even those persons that wanted to go, couldn’t, because they were held bondage to the sick financial encumbering going on in the city that simply wouldn’t heal fast enough in order to quickly get free of the city.
Or, because you were what most New Orleanians view their selves, a “Yat” at heart (taken from the distinctly New Orleanian expression “W’Yat,” or, “Where are you at”), even if you did manage to leave New Orleans, by the way, which is a city that ranks among the lowest in the nation in out-of-state migration patterns, you stayed sick right along with her, even dying right along with her, if only from a distant perspective.
Fact is, most persons still felt dead right along with her, six months, a year later. Sure there was Mardi Gras in the interim, but everybody knew it was purely symbolic as most of New Orleans’ citizens wouldn’t even be able to or want to attend. Even those that attended generally had to struggle to do so, since their peers and they were still largely homeless. And whether you were attending or not, it was still hard to really enjoy, since right there nagging in your other ear, away from the floats and the party, was the fact that Mardi Gras just wasn’t the same. The city felt like it was trying to force itself to have a good time and put on a happy face six months later, despite all of the sadness in her.
Add into the daily grind all of the mishaps, controversy, anger and outrage over insurance companies, FEMA, lending institutions, mortgage companies, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the New Orleans Sewerage Board, the Levee Boards, a parish president and some pump operators in Kenner, New Orleans Mayor and city officials, the Governor and state officials, the President and federal officials, jobs and professions, contractors, crime, health concerns, living and housing concerns, and financial worries, to hit the high points, and you begin to see how tired, worn out, and dying for that matter, the typical New Orleanian is, two years after Hurricane Katrina.
Dr. Minyard had this to say about the medical community’s different observations eventually reaching the same conclusion he has come to, regarding the state of New Orleans’ health and whether or not one day he will be proven correct saying, “Years from now when they talk about post-traumatic stress, New Orleans after Katrina will be the poster child.”
Speaking of post-traumatic stress, the nation is still at war stemming from the traumatic 9-11 attack-occurrence. And while the national “stress” alert may have taken a back seat in the minds of many, few would disagree that daily life from that day on, on the whole, has been at least a little more stressful, if not a lot more.
What’s the difference between what happened in New York and the largest homicidal act ever committed against the United States, in the killing of over 2750 persons and counting, and the loss of two of the world’s largest towers and other Downtown area buildings causing a huge hiccup in not only NY’s, but the world’s economy; and what happened to nearly the entire Louisiana Gulf Coast, by two major hurricanes within weeks of each other, with one of them becoming the most costly natural disaster the United States has ever seen to date, flooding 80% of New Orleans, causing the Mississippi River to close down shipping lanes both entering and leaving the mouth of the Mississippi, on up the river, including the Port of New Orleans, and the nations off-shore oil and gas industry to come to a screeching halt, causing a ripple effect across the globe, as well as taking the lives of approximately 1800-plus persons and counting?
Aside from the total number of deaths and why they happened, and that one happened by fire and the other by water, there really isn’t much difference between the two disastrous events when it comes down to the aftermath.
Both cities were shell-shocked along with the rest of the nation, and world for that matter. Both cities lost a large number of people in one fell swoop, and both cities have had resistance surrounding the classification of post-disaster deaths. Yet, both cities’ medical communities continue to count the dead amongst themselves.
Both cities, and by way of extension their states, took big financial hits. And both cities struggle still today to establish their new crowning financial beacons to at least where they were before they were taken down by fire and put out by flooding waters.
Both cities’ victims and victims’ families have had a hard way to go. In New York, not to mention the obvious, all reasonable medical attention due has to be fought for, and it took years before a 9-11 Memorial even started to become a reality.
In New Orleans, all reasonable medical attention due has to be fought for, coupled with the ongoing struggle residents endure for some sort of finality to it all, some sort of memorial to put it all behind them.
The Big Easy will probably go the same way the Big Apple recently has in directly linking deaths after 9/11 to 9/11. New York is beginning to add to the total 9/11 death tally, deaths which are directly attributable to the 9/11 event. (See, Toxic Dust Claims First Victim, by Troy Pankey)
And just the same, New Orleans, et al, will begin to see who died after Hurricane Katrina and how their deaths are directly linked to the hurricane.
Yes, be it the deaths counted up for the months and months after the hurricane, or the slow deaths suffered since then, Hurricane Katrina is still killing people and people are still dying from her two years later.
Attorney David Koen, NPR Commentary, National Public Radio, A Murder Shakes Confidence in New Orleans, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6806017
Associated Press Staff Writer, Editor and Publisher, America’s Oldest Journal Covering the Newspaper Industry, Newspaper’s Death Notices Suggest Toll from Katrina Still Rising http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003593274&imw;=Y
Kate Moran, The Times Picayune, Katrina death rates murky, http://www.nola.com/timespic/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-8/118068369488590.xml&coll;=1
Michelle Roberts, Associated Press Writer, CBS News, Families Blame More Deaths on Katrina, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/13/ap/national/mainD8M04Q300.shtml
Associated Press Staff Writer, Boston Globe, New Orleans suicide rate may be up, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/09/14/new_orleans_suicide_rate_may_be_up/
Troy Pankey, Freelance Writer, Associated Content News, 9/11 Toxic Dust Claims First Victim, http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/260309/911_toxic_dust_claims_first_victim.html
