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Death toll estimates grossly overstated in New Orleans

Houston Chronical:

As authorities shifted their efforts from rescuing the living to recovering the dead Friday, they discovered something encouraging in the dirty floodwaters — fewer bodies than expected.

There were other signs of hope as well across the metropolitan area as waters continued to recede and survivors made small, tentative steps toward rebounding from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans officials said the death toll may not reach the epic proportions forecast by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who feared that as many as 10,000 people may have died in the storm.

"I think there's some encouragement in what we've found in the initial sweeps that some of the catastrophic deaths that some people predicted may not have occurred," said Terry Ebbert, New Orleans' homeland security chief.

But Ebbert declined to give a new estimate of the dead.

...

Nagin never had a basis for his earlier estimate. It was just another attempt to sensationalize the fate of the city that he had failed to evacuated according to his own plan.