Federal volunteer told to "anticipate 40,000 bodies."

This is horrifying news that almost certainly won't be picked up by the media at large. Hopefully this is one time someone in government will later claim to have "misspoken" and not be lying. Considering the wide acceptance of the notion that the death toll will be a minimum of 10,000, this is too chilling a statement to ignore.

A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.

"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.

His partner, Dan Hicks, of Paducah, Ky., was deployed Monday. Buckner, of Dickson, is on standby. Their funeral home is one of several collection sites for donations to be taken to the Red Cross in Fayetteville on Wednesday for transfer to places in need.

The 40,000 estimate does "not include the number of disinterred remains that have been displaced from ... mausoleums," Buckner told the Times-Gazette Monday.

And it begs the question, why are people who work for Homeland Security being told that there could be 40,000 dead when the heads of these agencies are trying to tell us how surprised they were that anything serious happened at all?