The human cost: Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin said the total of dead left by Hurricane Katrina would "shock the nation". Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco said people should prepare themselves for "thousands" of dead.
But yesterday the total of those officially listed as dead in the state stood at 71. How many lives has Katrina really claimed? Mr Nagin has put his name to a figure of 10,000 as what he sees as the likeliest figure of dead.
A total of nearly 40,000 are officially unaccounted for, but it is accepted that the vast majority of them have probably either survived the storm or had already left the city without informing anyone of exactly where they were going.
The figures of those still unaccounted for in this city of just under 500,000 people have been used to draw up a computerised estimate of the dead which is double that of Mr Nagin's. But some believe that the true figure will be far, far smaller, even just in the hundreds.
"The estimates are always far in excess of the reality," said one US reporter who specialises in covering disasters, as the rescue operations were co-ordinated outside Harrah's casino in New Orleans. "I would not be surprised if we were looking at as few 200 to 300."
Such enormous discrepancies are not unusual. When the World Trade Centre was attacked in September 2001, initial estimates of the dead were between 30,000 and 40,000. These were gradually revised down to a figure of 10,000, which was accepted initially as a likely total. In fact, the final figure was fewer than 3,000.
"The honest answer is we just don't know," an official in Baton Rouge said. "All we have to go on is what the official figures are as people are identified. Anything else is a guess." A daily update is provided by Louisiana health officials on those identified: it is accepted that the total will soon exceed 100.
Bodies are being recovered every day, a mixture of those found floating as the rescue teams get through to isolated areas and elderly people who have perished in their homes while awaiting rescue. But so far there has been no major discovery of masses of bodies in any of the areas that are gradually being opened up. This has led to suggestions that local politicians are over-estimating the numbers of dead.
The morgue being used in San Gabriel, the small town near Baton Rouge that has been assigned the task of handling the dead, has a staff of 150 who have arrived to deal with what the local newspaper, the Advocate, estimates will be "thousands" of bodies.
One of the problems is that some people who are missing, as with the St Stephen's Day tsunami, will never be traced so a guesstimate is all that is possible.
Increasingly, there are calls for more accurate figures so that the true nature of the disaster can be grasped. - (Guardian Service)