Katrina Killed Across Class Lines
The well-to-do died along with the poor, an analysis of data shows. The findings counter common beliefs that disadvantaged blacks bore the brunt.
By Nicholas Riccardi, Doug Smith and David Zucchino
Times Staff Writers
December 18, 2005
The bodies of New Orleans residents killed by Hurricane Katrina were almost as likely to be recovered from middle-class neighborhoods as from the city's poorer districts, such as the Lower 9th Ward, according to a Times analysis of data released by the state of Louisiana.
You sure that analysis wasn't lifted from the blog network?
This article is a feel-good piece based on worthless information.
Of the 1,095 people killed by Katrina in Louisiana, the state has formally identified and released demographic data on 535. Many other victims are tentatively identified, though 93 remain unidentifiable. A couple of bodies are recovered every week, and officials say other victims may have been swept into the Gulf of Mexico, never to be found.
Medical and dental records were destroyed by the storm, and many corpses are so severely decomposed that traditional identification methods such as fingerprints are useless.
And it's pure spin, because death was not the only repercussion to be concerned about.
Of the 380 bodies from New Orleans that have been formally identified, a moderately disproportionate number are white. New Orleans' population was 28% white, yet 33% of the identified victims in the city are white and 67% black.
The article does discuss why those folk were still there.
[Richard ] Campanella [a Tulane University geographer who has studied which parts of the city were hit the worst by flooding] said he was not surprised at the even distribution of bodies between the city's poorer and more affluent neighborhoods. He noted that 70% of the identified Katrina victims in New Orleans were older than 60, frequently lifelong residents who had ridden out other hurricanes and refused to evacuate. Elderly people are more likely to be wealthier and to live in wealthier neighborhoods.
And this is key...those who died in wealthy aread did so because they didn't want to abandon their property. They didn't evacuate.
And what we saw, what we complained about, wasn't the deaths caused by the storm. It was the abandonment of the survivors...survivors that wanted to escape, as evidenced by their following the instructions to go to the Superdome...by the government.
We all saw this, live, on television. And the person at the L.A. Times that approved this article should be ashamed.
There are also other problems with the data--even though they have data on approx. 1/2. There is no way that this is a random sample of those people. Moreover, the first article on class commits the ecological fallacy since the data is collected on neighborhoods and not individuals. Even if people were found in middle class neighborhoods that does not mean that they were middle class. They need to have data on the individuals; the neighborhood is a proxy, and not a particularly good one. I also think the notion that poor people are not poor because they live in an extremely poor area is absurd, especially since one of the key things that kept some people in place was the inability to afford getting out and living elsewhere.
I'm also curious if they removed the nursing home victims; how that would affect the data. And last point, age was undisputably a factor in who lived and died. I wonder if the younger people were more likely to be poor or minority--that would create an interesting analysis.