Smaller New Orleans After Katrina, Census Shows

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
NYT

NEW ORLEANS — When Hurricane Katrina hit and the murky waters rushed through levee breaches, even the facts were drowned.

Official documents were destroyed, years of photographs were ruined, and a city’s ability to know itself was lost. Answers to basic questions like how many people lived here, where they lived and who they were could not be easily answered.

Now there finally are some numbers, and they show that the city is 29 percent smaller than a decade ago.

The Census Bureau reported on Thursday that 343,829 people were living in the city of New Orleans on April 1, 2010, four years and seven months after it was virtually emptied by the floodwaters that followed the hurricane.

(More here.)