Does this piss off anybody else other than me?

During the Katrina disaster (a mostly man-made disaster I might add), I repeatedly heard trained journalists talking about how New Orleans had been decimated by the storm. I heard the same nonsense during Hurricane Rita. And every time there is some sort of nasty terrorist attack in Iraq (or anywhere for that matter), talking heads everywhere say that such and so was "decimated".

I'm sorry, but I can't live with this anymore. Decimate means to kill 10 percent of a given population. When Roman legion captures a particularly nasty bunch of non-Roman, they would decimate the prisoner, i.e. kill one out of every ten.

Will somebody please tell these alledgedly educated, so-called journalists to pick another, more accurate term, other than decimate?