Within weeks of the attack on the World Trade Center, the public knew a lot about many of the Sept. 11 victims -- their families, their jobs, their commute, even some of the intimate details of their final moments. The victims' families mobilized with remarkable effectiveness to make sure their loved ones were found and their stories told.
More than a month after Hurricane Katrina, the vast majority of the nearly 1,000 dead in Louisiana lie anonymously in a morgue -- largely because authorities have released only a few dozen names, but also, perhaps, because many of the victims' families were scattered by the storm and are still picking up the pieces of their lives.
There has been no clamor from the victims' loved ones, little public pressure on officials to release the names of the dead or at least try harder to identify them.
Most of the 988 dead in a St. Gabriel morgue remain unidentified, awaiting release to relatives. Hamstrung by lost dental records and the decomposition of bodies that floated in floodwaters and lay in searing heat for days or weeks, officials say an accurate catalog of the dead may be weeks away, or longer.
"We know families must be frantic," said Department of Health and Hospitals spokesman Christina Stephens. "We completely understand and are trying to have it move efficiently and quickly, but we have no margin for error. We have to be 100 percent sure before we tell someone a body is their loved one."
Michael Doberson, an Arapahoe County, Colorado, coroner who helped identify victims at the World Trade Center and in Louisiana, said one difference here is that "things are so much more scattered."
"It happened over such a great area so it's hard to get an idea where or who the people are," he said. "In 9-11 it was all at one site. There was a place for people to gather and present their plight. You aren't seeing that now probably because families are scattered and because there's not just one central place people can go to."
He added: "Something else to consider is that in some cases whole families may have been wiped out and there's no one left to look for them."
The Sept. 11 victims included many stockbrokers and traders, and their families tended to be well-off and well-connected, with the means to put pressure on public officials and get their story out. They also had the backing of their loved ones' employers. A large number of the victims in New Orleans were poor and black.
Silas Lee, a New Orleans political analyst, said that may help explain the lack of pressure to speed up the identification.
"Being black and poor may be a part of it, but it may not be exclusively that," said Lee, who is black. He said he believes the main reason is that everyone has been dispersed all over the country by the storm.
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