3,262

I went back to the list of the missing in Louisiana after Katrina and Rita with a stronger computer, and as of this afternoon, the total number named there is 3,262. Even with a more powerful processor and a faster connection, it still took several minutes to load completely. There's a part of me that hopes many of the people on the list have just had too much trouble accessing the page to make sure their name gets removed, but I understand that this is just wishful thinking. I'm sure they have plenty to do in Louisiana without listening to some semi-computer literate blogger, but if they could redo the page with a link to each letter in the alphabet rather than loading 3,262 names and addresses on a single page, they'd make it a useful site rather than a bottleneck.

I can't really grasp what that number means. Every name on that list is connected to other people who survived the storm and the flood--at least one person had to notice they were missing to add their name to the list, after all--and everyone in that extended network is affected by the disappearance. While each disappearance is probably a loss, a person who didn't survive (whether final proof is ever found or not), at last a few are there due to a misunderstanding of some sort. Perhaps families have been separated--everyone in a family may have survived, but some are in Chicago, some in Houston, some in Nashville, some in Charleston, South Carolina, and they don't know the location of each other. Maybe some really have been unable to access the Website to find that their names are on it. But I fear the vast majority of the people named on the lists truly didn't make it through, and the friends, relatives, or even acquaintances who added their names to the list may never know for sure one way or the other. If only half of these people were to be proved dead, it would more than double Katrina's current death toll.