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There's much debate on both.
In the second category, there were officially 101 people listed as still missing two weeks ago in Harrison County, MS. I haven't heard the numbers on the others. Hancock County was hit harder than Harrison, but it doesn't have the same type of beachfront, so probably fewer people could have been carried out to sea. Plus, it's a smaller county. Jackson County, on the other side of Harrison County, probably has very few to none. It does not have a regular beach front, some of the beach is undeveloped land and reserves, and the storm was weaker there than in Harrison or Hancock.
So of the 101 from Harrison, maybe half could have been carried to sea? From Hancock, maybe a similar number. There were about 40 people, IIRC, who were listed as missing after Camille, and that's a good guess as to where many of them wound up.
No one from New Orleans would have been carried to the Gulf. It was a different type of flooding, through broken levees, so there was no backwash when the water left. Maybe a few wound up in Lake Pontchartrain, since the levees broke on canals that led to the Lake. But again, because they were levee breaks, there was no sudden backflow of water into the Lake.
Louisiana has a long coastline, but it's mostly swampy, marshy, illdefined land--fishing camps, harbors, stuff like that--with some small towns, like Grand Isle. Most people evacuated the coastline days before--there were a lot of reports that everyone was out of Grand Isle, and I'm sure that was true for most of that reason. So again, probably not many people could have been washed out from Louisiana's coast, but I haven't seen counts on the missing, so I couldn't say for sure. I'm sure the number, at worst, is in the dozens, not the hundreds.
If you are asking how many are still missing in the Gulf region, there is little accurate information on that. The Harrison Count officials said 101 a couple weeks ago, but I don't know if that number changed. The Civil Defense website last I saw listed over 1000 "missing," but went on to explain that this was just a compilation of the number of reports of people searching for other people from various sources. In other words, if I reported a friend missing, they would include that, without verifying whether anyone else knew where this person was. You even have people posting that are looking for each other.
There are similar lists in New Orleans that have around 7000 adults listed, though I emailed on such site and they claimed the number was closer to 4000, and they were still verifying. Some people on these lists are entries that will say "James. Last name unknown. Race and gender unknown." In other words, they aren't close to verified lists.
There is a list of missing children with around 2000 names. Again, many listings are incomplete. Also, the web site says a lot of these kids aren't missing, that they are, for instance, living with one parent and being sought by the other, or by a grandparent or other relative.
Obviously, New Orleans will be very hard to verify, given the widespread evacuation. I imagine in a few months they'll have a pretty accurate count of missing.
So no one knows, in either case, but that's a rough summary of the kind of numbers involved, to the best of my knowledge, though my research hasn't been thorough on the matter, and I guess all those who post that the government is covering up tens of thousands of deaths could be right. My grandfather believed that man never landed on the moon. He could be right, too. He was from New Orleans.
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