The destruction left in the wake of Katrina is terrible. I spoke with a friend in Louisiana who is fortunately safe - he said that most of the damage near him has been downed trees and loss of power. He works in insurance, though, so I imagine he'll get an idea of the scale of destruction over the next few weeks.
Of course, the story is also dominating the US media. A CNN headline declares it a "tragedy of great proportions". There was obviously a ton of property damage and it looks as though the Saints won't be playing any homes games any time soon. The CNN homepage is littered with stories about the rising water in New Orleans, victims left with nothing, and power outages in Alabama.
Putting the massive property damage aside for a moment, let's look at the deaths involved. While any death is tragic, the death toll here is relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things: 70 at first count, now up to 110 but expected to rise. (Update: "New Orleans mayor says Katrina killed hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of people in city, Associated Press reports.")
At the same time, hundreds also died in a stampede in Baghdad. Hundreds, in this case, is at least 648. (Update: up to 841). And while the story is the lead story on the world news, it's otherwise buried behind the Katrina news on CNN's home page.
This isn't surprising of course. Tragedy is always worse when we can personalize the victim. We can much more easily identify with an American living in Louisiana than we can a Shiite in Iraq. This is precisely the reason the US media runs headlines for weeks when a young, blond white woman is abducted, taking special care to point out she was an honors student. Oh, and did we mention she was pretty and popular and blond?
In the aftermath of the London bombing, a big deal was made about a single American feared dead. And we think, "Hey, I could have been in on vacation too! That could have been me!" There was similar rhetoric after the Tsunamis in 2004. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, and yet US media makes a big deal because that number includes a couple of Americans? Does anyone here even remember the 20,000 who died in a 2001 earthquake in India? Or the 40,000 who died in a 2003 earthquake in Iran? (Probably not, I don't think any Americans died).
But what is really interesting to me in this case is that these deaths were caused by rumors of a suicide bomber. I know Bruce Schneier said terrorism is a crime against the mind, but here we have a situation where the terrorists managed to kill 648 people without a bomb.
648 841 is a LOT of casualties.
To put this in perspective, the death toll in the recent London bombings was 55, less than 1/10 of those killed in Iraq yesterday. The March 2004 bombings in Madrid killed less than 200. Even the attacks on September 11th, the largest single terrorist attack, claimed around 3,000 lives.
In other words, terrorists were able to kill more than 1/5 of those killed on 9/11 with a mere rumor. Scary thought.