As the floodwaters recede in Houston, the search continues for victims not yet counted in the death toll for Hurricane Harvey. But one expert is…
As the floodwaters recede in Houston, the search continues for victims not yet counted in the death toll for Hurricane Harvey. But one expert is confident that the final tally will be nowhere near what it was for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005.
The exact number of deaths attributed to Katrina is not known. Most estimates put the number around 1,800. In contrast, Harvey has been blamed for 31 deaths so far.
That number is sure to rise but not to Katrina levels, said John Mutter, a Columbia University professor specializing in natural disasters who conducted a study on Katrina’s death toll.
Harvey “won’ t go to a number like Katrina’s. It’s too big a leap, ” Mutter said. “You’ d have to say either there are a lot of bodies that have not been discovered, or that the hurricane still has got some nasty work ahead.”
Harvey hasn’ t disappeared, though it is a shadow of what it was when it first struck Texas. “But it would be surprising if the death toll went from what it is now to numbers like Katrina, ” Mutter said.
Several factors explain why Harvey’s death toll is lower than Katrina’s, Mutter said.
People were much better informed before Harvey hit the Texas coast and in the days afterward when the storm lingered over the southeast part of the state. “Remember that Katrina was 12 years ago, and things like Twitter and social media have become a lot more advanced, so there is more information out there, ” Mutter said.
Each storm had a different impact, he said. Katrina was more of a storm surge, with ocean water rapidly flooding New Orleans and overwhelming its levees. In Houston, the flooding was mostly caused by rain, which took longer to accumulate to flood levels, giving residents more time to leave.
Disasters of this magnitude hit hardest on the poor and elderly because of their lack of resources and mobility, Mutter said. Houston is a much more mobile place than New Orleans. It has an extensive network of highways and most people have cars, he said.
In contrast, in New Orleans, particularly in the hard-hit Lower 9th Ward, “most people didn’ t have cars and there was poor public transportation, ” he said.
