Casualties of the September 11 attacks
2,974 victims were confirmed to have died in the initial attacks; this includes Sneha Anne Philip, a doctor, who in 2008 was ruled to have died on 9/11. In 2007, the New York City medical examiner's office began to add people who died of illnesses caused by exposure to dust from the site to the official death toll. The first such victim was a woman, a civil rights lawyer, who had died from a chronic lung condition in February 2002. In September 2009, the office added a man who died in October 2008, and in 2011, a male accountant who had died in December 2010. This raises the number of victims at the World Trade Center site to 2,753, and the overall 9/11 death toll to 2,996.
Johnstown Flood
The total death toll was calculated originally as 2,209 people, making the disaster the largest loss of civilian life in the United States at the time. This number of deaths was later surpassed by fatalities in the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. However, as pointed out by David McCullough in 1968 (pages 266 and 278), a man reported as presumed dead (not known to have been found) had survived. In 1900, Leroy Temple showed up in Johnstown to reveal he had not died but had extricated himself from the flood debris at the stone bridge below Johnstown and walked out of the valley. Until 1900 Temple had been living in Beverly, Massachusetts. Therefore, the official death toll should be 2,208.