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The Katrina killer surge in Mississippi

NY Times:

Most of the victims were in their 60's or older. Nearly all drowned. Their bodies were found inside or just outside their destroyed houses.

In the days and hours before Hurricane Katrina arrived, they spoke with relatives and friends who pleaded with them to go, and many had the means to do so. But having survived Hurricane Camille, which killed at least 131 Mississippians in 1969, they apparently never believed that this new storm could be worse.

Three weeks after Hurricane Katrina emerged out of the Gulf of Mexico, the State of Mississippi has confirmed 220 deaths and publicly identified about 95 victims, allowing the first detailed glimpse into the lives that were lost in the hurricane, principally from a storm surge that reached as high as 30 feet and swept miles inland, pushing away most objects in its path.

The storm claimed lives in nearly every coastal Mississippi town and city from Pascagoula in the east to Pearlington in the west. Many drowned in rising water that trapped them in their attics. Others were swept away by the surge that engulfed and destroyed their houses.

A handful of victims who were hit by falling debris have had blunt-force trauma listed as a contributing cause of death.

...

In contrast to those who could not leave New Orleans, many had the vehicles to leave but did not because their spouses were frail, because they could not bear to leave their pets or because younger relatives had agreed to stay behind with them.

Sometimes people just make choices that are fatal. With all of our new sophistication on hurricane predictions, the five day tracking charts on average still are off by 270 miles. That means that those in the area of ultimate landfall may have less than 24 hours to evacuate and prepare their houses for the storm. Some people clearly have difficulty with that short a decision cycle even when obvious danger is approaching. Cameron, Louisiana which took the eye of Rita was hardly in the danger zone earlier in the week when the focus of most charts was Matagorda, Texas. In Washington, Texas, I went from being on the wet side of a Category 5 hurricane to being in the path of the eye of a Category 4 hurricane to getting only some hot north wind from a Category 3 storm that struck on the Texas-Louisiana border, all in a matter of days of frantic preperation. Many of my neighbors did no storm preperation. Others might have done more. We all make choices and sometimes we have to live or die with them.