Bodies still being found after Katrina
Six months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, bodies are still being pulled from wrecked and rotting homes.
Firefighters in hard hats with cadaver dogs found the latest victim on Monday in a house that had been inspected months ago.
Steve Glynn, chief of special operations for the New Orleans Fire Department, said it was the second corpse found since recovery efforts resumed on Friday.
The race and gender of the body found on Monday in the black Lower Ninth Ward could not be determined, Glynn said.
“I don’t want to be too graphic,” Glynn added. “But it was confusing at first.”
The official door-to-door search of New Orleans ended
on 3 October with a toll of 972.
Since then, 131 more bodies have been found. Some by officials, some by horror-struck friends and family members and some by insurance inspectors.
Firefighters continued to search homes for a few more months, but had to stop in December when funding ran out.
Thousands missing
Meanwhile, state officials continued to slog through the thousands of reports of missing people.
They have culled the list to 1900 people who disappeared amid the chaos of a mass evacuation after the vast storm on 29 August.
They think about 400 of those are probably dead.
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Many of those bodies could have been washed away in the storm, but officials have sent a list of names and last known addresses to recovery workers, hoping to recover as many bodies as possible.
Searchers have said they expect to find many of the dead in the Ninth Ward, a poor neighbourhood of about 5600 homes, bounded by the Industrial Canal, the Mississippi River, swampland and the hurricane-ravaged suburb of St Bernard Parish.
The coroner continues to struggle to identify the remains of those pulled from the wreckage.
Of the 910 people examined at a special mortuary at Carville, 86 storm victims remain unidentified.
Melissa Walker, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said the coroner had been unable to locate the families of 74 people whose bodies were ready to be released for burial.