While we are on the subject of people getting out of town, are you wondering, like I am, how they arrived at the figure "80%" for number of people who evacuated? Based on what I've seen, I'm beginning to think it was much higher.
New Orleans had a population of about 500,000. If 100,000 stayed behind and 30,000 were in the Superdome, where were the other 70,000 and why have we seen no pictures of the subsequent mass exodus of the remaining 70,000? I think they would be hard to miss, particularly if they had to rely on buses or other transport to get out of town. The "I'm not leaving" crowd seems to be a few here, a few there, not 100's or 1,000's in this or that place. By all accounts, most of the city is a ghost town.
I wonder if they are keeping track of how many people were brought to the different shelters direct from the city post-hurricane. Like the estimates of 10,000 dead that now appear to be heavily inflated, perhaps the numbers of those remaining was, in fact, smaller than assumed. |
