Bob Johannessen Quotations

We're going to count one at a time. It could take days. It could take years. It could take lifetimes.

So many people have been completely displaced. A family that winds up in Buffalo, New York, may not have the wherewithal to claim a body and conduct a burial.

Our goal is to do everything we can under the circumstances to treat each body with as much dignity and respect as we possibly can. We're trying to treat them all as individuals.

We've been getting more than a thousand complaint calls a day for the last week. We can't do much to help out. It's not our program.

We are obligated under federal law to return that money. That is what we did.

We don't know what to expect. It means we're prepared.

The death toll will rise without a doubt.

We knew that several years ago, we had about 250 cases. In the last few years, there has been a little over 100 cases. We're hoping this season won't be any worse than in the past few years.

We could provide prescriptions, but at 100 percent state expense.

The resources of the state to date have been on getting the living out of New Orleans. It is changing to recovering those who perished.

Our agency will pay for this if we have to. It's too critical to get caught up in a question of who ultimately is going to pay for it.

Apparently it's an issue between the City of New Orleans and FEMA. The State of Louisiana knew nothing about this, it came as a complete shock to us.

There might still be bodies found -- for instance, if a house was locked and nobody able to go into it.

It wasn't us. I'll have to check with headquarters.

It's a place for the process to start, to work through the grief of beginning the long road of possible identification.

The elderly were much more likely to be in hospitals and nursing homes as well as possibly homebound and not able to access transportation in order to evacuate from the storm.

The law is silent on those two issues.