...According to the New Orleans mayor:

In New Orleans, where tens of thousands of people remained despite a mandatory evacuation order issued Sunday, Mayor Ray Nagin told a news conference that Katrina probably killed thousands. No confirmed casualty figures have yet been released for the city or affected parts of Louisiana.

"We know there is a significant number of dead bodies in the water," as well as other people dead in attics, Nagin said, according to the Associated Press. Asked how many dead, he said: "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands."

Nagin said that this time, there will be a "total evacuation of the city." He added, "We have to. The city will not be functional for two or three months."

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Brendan Loy hopes the mayor is wrong:

"However, after his comments last night about how the attempts to fix the levee breach had been abandoned, I am predisposed to believe that Mayor Nagin tends to talk through his hat and doesn't necessarily have the facts to back up what he's saying. The man doesn't seem to have much of a "filter," if you will, between his private thoughts and his public statements, and he doesn't seem to fully grasp that what he says is taken as having a lot of authority, and there's a lot of responsibility that goes with that. So while what he's saying about the death toll may very well be true (God forbid), I hardly think his is a definitive estimate.

It's true, of course, that death tolls in natural disasters tend to rise. But wild early estimates of death tolls, formulated when everything seems utterly bleak and based on guesswork rather than facts, are sometimes wrong. As I recall, the headline of one of the New York papers on September 13, 2001 was "10,000 FEARED DEAD." So let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Mayor Nagin might be right -- I'd even go so far as to say, based on my own guesswork, that he probably is -- but I'm not yet convinced that it is pointless to hope and pray he might be wrong."