Katrina's body count

There are a number of news articles on the web, findable through Google, that say there were no storm-related deaths in Washington Parish. Search the archives at The Daily News using the phrase "died Monday, Aug. 29" and you'll get ten hits. All but one were residents of nursing homes.

Word-of-mouth suggests that these folks died as a result of the intense heat after the storm, when the power was off. Apparently nursing homes didn't have enough generator capacity to run their air conditioners. I hope they've fixed that, for the upcoming storm season.

This article seems to count those nine people's deaths as storm-related. I thnk that's realistic:

Nine parish residents and one evacuee have been confirmed dead as a result of the storm or its aftereffects.

One Bogalusa resident perished in Biloxi, according to The Daily News. I don't know who would "evacuate" from 60 miles inland to the coast before a hurricane. May G*d rest his soul.

We'll come back to this topic in later posts, because there are some little mysteries related to bodies in Bogalusa after Katrina.

Update: Air conditions corrected to air conditioners.