(no subject)

From littlebitca:

Drowning New Orleans: "A major hurricane could swamp New Orleans under 20 feet of water, killing thousands. Human activities along the Mississippi River have dramatically increased the risk, and now only massive reengineering of southeastern Louisiana can save the city. [...] Large hurricanes come close every year. In 1965 Hurricane Betsy put parts of the city under eight feet of water. In 1992 monstrous Hurricane Andrew missed the city by only 100 miles. In 1998 Hurricane Georges veered east at the last moment but still caused billions of dollars of damage. A direct hit is inevitable."

The date of the article? October 2001.


From atalantapendrag: Cancer Cluster or Coincidence?


( scott_lynch is my hero )

Major companies -- including Home Depot and Ford -- pledge millions to hurricane relief efforts. "Corporations are contributing millions of dollars in relief aid to help cope with the destruction left by Hurricane Katrina. The following is a list of companies that have taken steps to provide aid to those in need of funds, food and medicine following Monday's storm..."

Fats Domino found in New Orleans: "The musician's niece, Checquoline Davis, posted a plea on Craigslist.com for information on her missing relatives, writing that Domino and his wife, Rosemary, and their children and grandchildren "didn't get out" of their New Orleans home. Her plea was one of thousands seeking information on missing friends and family on the site."

interdictor: "This journal has become the Survival of New Orleans blog. In less perilous times it was simply a blog for me to talk smack and chat with friends. Now this journal exists to share firsthand experience of the disaster and its aftermath with anyone interested."

I cannot confirm the Superdome "chemical plant" explosion you guys are reporting. When Bravo Team becomes functional this morning, we're going to do a Medium Range Recon Patrol around our section of the CBD. We need to access the area for potential human threats, situational threats (burning buildings, etc.), flooding, potential evac routes, military and civilian authority presence, etc.

We bring the camera with us everywhere we go, whether it's to empty fuel into the tank or perform personal hygiene.

Everyone has secondary responsibilities. Crystal, for instance, has the secondary responsibility of organizing physical assets. Sigmund's secondary responsibility is photography. Donny's secondary responsibility is inter-team communication. My secondary responsibility is first aid. And so on.

"Destroying FEMA":

In the days to come, as the nation and the people along the Gulf Coast work to cope with the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we will be reminded anew, how important it is to have a federal agency capable of dealing with natural catastrophes of this sort. This is an immense human tragedy, one that will work hardship on millions of people. It is beyond the capabilities of state and local government to deal with. It requires a national response.

Which makes it all the more difficult to understand why, at this moment, the country's premier agency for dealing with such events -- FEMA -- is being, in effect, systematically downgraded and all but dismantled by the Department of Homeland Security.

( Federal disaster declarations covered 90,000 square miles along the U.S. Gulf Coast, an area roughly the size of Great Britain )

( Things turn ugly at the New Orleans Convention Center )

( "The sight of a superpower humbled is in itself humbling," the Daily Telegraph wrote in an editorial )

Marooned doctors plead 'Please help us'

Doctors at two desperately crippled hospitals in New Orleans called The Associated Press Thursday morning pleading for rescue, saying they were nearly out of food and power and had been forced to move patients to higher floors to escape looters.

(See the video report of a sniper attack at Charity Hospital -- 1:06)

( She asked a police officer for assistance and his response was, "Go to hell - it's every man for himself" )

Housing for Refugees

callmecayce: "I don't know if you've gotten this one, but http://moveon.org just emailed me about this their housing site. This is what (part of) the email said..."

This morning, we've launched an emergency national housing drive to connect your empty beds with hurricane victims who desperately need a place to wait out the storm. You can post your offer of housing (a spare room, extra bed, even a decent couch) and search for available housing online at: http://www.hurricanehousing.org.

From stepliana: ( If you know of students who were planning to attend a 4 year institution in the area of the hurricane and are now without a college home, we will guarantee admission )

More housing help: http://www.katrinahome.com.

The Houston SPCA is taking in the pets of refugees arriving in the Houston area:

Due to the hit from Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region, the Louisiana SPCA moved all animals out of their shelter to the Houston SPCA. We are now accepting animals from those who are staying in Houston Area Shelters. For those needing shelter for their pets, please call our hotline at 713-802-0555.

Monetary donations are needed to help us care for the over 260 extra animals in our shelter and to help us help the Louisiana SPCA respond to the needs of the animals still in the area.

Hurricane Katrina resources from lederhosen and more from zarq.


( Late addition: Snopes tackles Katrina )

That's all for now, because I'm afraid I'll exhaust LJ's single entry capacity.

(no subject)

I promise I will post about something other than Katrina later today. Just for my own sanity, if nothing else.

( These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so, and I expect they will )

( Get off your asses and let's do something )

( I say burn this whole city down )

( I think it puts into question all of the Homeland Security and Northern Command planning for the last four years, because if we can't respond faster than this to an event we saw coming across the Gulf for days, then why do we think we're prepared to respond to a nuclear or biological attack? )

Can't believe I forgot this: The Hunger Site is giving food to Katrina victims. "Your click on the 'Give Free Food' button funds food for the hungry, paid for by site sponsors whose ads appear after you click and provided to people in need around the world through the efforts of Mercy Corps and America's Second Harvest."

ETA: Download this.

(no subject)

superego_18: "Hi. I've been a long time reader of your livejournal and know that many people read it as well. If anyone that is reading this and is in the New Orleans area, I have a favor. If anyone in that area might have seen or heard from my cousin or if they know where the citizens of Slydell, LA were evacuated to. Her name is Amanda Ernst. She's 16 years old. I know it's a longshot but I'm desperate. I wrote about it in my latest journal entry, the post itself is really long but her name is at the bottom for those that don't want to read the whole thing. It's mostly just me venting. Thank you."

( His numbed staff was forced to subsist on intravenous sugar solutions )

( Where on earth could you have misplaced all our military choppers? Do you need help finding them? I once lost my car in a Sears parking lot. Man, was that a drag )

Warning: FEMA Directing Donations to Pat Robertson

BBC Correspondents' Log

Wonkette: "Ray Nagin for President, Anderson Cooper for Secretary of Take No Shit"

I linked to an mp3 of Nagin's emotional interview in the previous entry (transcript here). Here's Cooper, who previously cut a back-patting senator into tiny little pieces:

KING: Anderson Cooper in Biloxi, Mississippi and you were an angry man today, Anderson, at what?

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I wouldn't say I'm angry, you know. I think I'm tired of hearing the politicians say that, you know, they understand the frustration of people down here. To me, you know, it's not frustration. It's not that people are frustrated.

It's that people are dying. I mean there are people dying. They're drowning to death and they drown in their living rooms and their bodies are rotting where they drowned and there are corpses in the street being eaten by rats and this is the United States of America.

My friend Marcus, another New Orleans citizen:

hey since a billion people read you, please let them know this:

Okay, just to stress for people not from NOLA. DO NOT BELIEVE CLAIMS OF RACISM in regards to rescuing. The fact of the matter is, this is created partly from anger of the stranded citizens and partly by the media. The fact is, The LARGE majority (i'd wager 90-95%) of the people who didn't/couldn't evacuate are poor black people. New Orleans is in impoverished city. Are black people dying because they're not rescued in time? Yes. Sadly. Very sadly, yes. Are white people being saved because they're white? HELL NO. Why? Because white people could afford to get out of town. I am not stressing the superiority of a race over another. It's just simple facts. NOLA is divide along poverty lines and those lines double as racial. It's a very unfortunate situation. How many white people have you seen rescued from rooftops? MAYBE 1? Probably elderly? That's because the neighborhoods hardest hit by flooding were unfortunately prominently black, poor neighborhoods. Remember, 70% of the population of New Orleans is non-white.

I hate that these people are dying and stranded, especially because they could do nothing to help themselves. They just couldn't get out. But these media accusations are baseless and are bold faced lies. And they only worsen the situation.

( It is one of the most unbelievable situations I've seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well )

Kanye West, rogue presenter. With video download.

squirrelgirl22: Just passing this on...shadbolt75 is going to give $1 to the Red Cross for each and every comment she gets here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/shadbolt75/53974.html. Check it out!

ETA: squirrelgirl22: "Ryan (shadbolt75) unfortunately met his donating limit midway though his posts, so I'm picking the torch and running with it. My employer will match dollar-for-dollar my total donation. I'm ready to give, but I'd love to do so on a bunch of people's behalfs as well!"

(no subject)

I don't keep enough of my promises, but I'm going to try to keep this one: here's an entry not about hurricanes, New Orleans, or Katrina.

Saw The Constant Gardener yesterday. Excellent movie, but sad. It's really two stories: an international conspiracy/murder mystery, and a love story. If you're a fan of Ralph Fiennes or Rachel Weisz, you should definitely go see it. If you're still traumatized from the hurricane devastation, you should... totally go see The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Seriously, if you don't want to be depressed, you may want to skip this one. Of course, that's what my mother said going in, and she came out really liking it, so it's your call, really. But I recommend it in general.

Venus in Boston is taking twelve times forever to get here. Dear Amazon: I am supposed to have this book read week after next. Put a quickness on it plzkthnx.

Blew off cleaning to play with t-shirt ideas. I'm lumping it all together under "t-shirt ideas," but really I think the whole mug/sticker/mousepad/etc. route will be better in the long run--that way people can buy a larger variety of things for the same amount of money. Really, if I were buying things, I would go for several stickers. Oh, and someone mentioned possibly making Heroine Addict bracelets, which I thought was a good idea, except for the fact that collecting the money for those would be complicated. That's the thing I like about Cafe Press--it's all in one place and extremely easy to manage, which I value highly. Of course, you're talking to someone who maintained a juiced-up Geocities page with nothing but Page Builder for nearly three years; l33t, I ain't.

Oh, speaking of which, I finally remembered that someone had recommended The Font Thing as a font-managing program, and let me tell you, it has made my life soooo much easier. By TFT's calculations, I have 1400+ fonts, so... yeah. You try searching through all of them for just the right font for "Hey baby, you so fine, baby!" I'll probably mock up a few options for the first batch of quotes I think I'm using, and if I'm not sure on some of them, I'll get y'all's feedback.


(I just went downstairs to get a glass of milk and take Lucky outside one last time, and my mother was trying to wake my stepfather up so he would go to bed. He turns to her, still half-asleep in the recliner, and says, "Nnnngh... binary numbers show up and cause havoc in the system." My mother turns to me and says, "How does he even know what binary numbers are? What are binary numbers?")