Ten thousand?

Katrina, New Orleans, The Superdome and the Convention Center have been evacuated and today the 200-foot gash in the levee has finally been plugged, which will allow for water to be pumped back into Lake Ponchartrain. The slow process of drying out New Orleans has finally begun.

And the body count has begun in earnest. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who had warned that the death toll would be "in the thousands," told NBC's "Today Show" that, "It wouldn't be unreasonable to have 10,000."

Unimaginable.

It's my hope that this will become like 9/11, where initial casualty calculations proved to be on the high end, and we saw that once-presumed-dead people were actually alive somewhere else.

In the meantime, the Times-Picayune, Louisiana's largest newspaper, published an open letter to Bush, calling for the firing of every official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

UPDATE:
As the collection of corpses gets into full swing, some are calling into question the "10,000" figure, saying it might end up being much lower. It's not sure if the death toll will be in the thousands or "just" in the hundreds.