amphichon

when i first heard about katrina i was in portland, and remembered being a bit surprised that a storm in the gulf was making front-page headlines all the way up in oregon. when i got back, i started loosely following the news out of new orleans, checking once in a while to see if satellite pictures were available yet, that sort of thing. over the next couple of days, i started feeling a little uneasy about what i was seeing – things were sounding a lot worse than i had imagined – so i started following more closely. around this time i started feeling sad that i hadn’t visited new orleans when i had the chance a few years ago, since it didn’t sound like the city would ever quite be the same.

now for the last day or so i’ve been almost obsessively reading everything i can find about what’s going on down there, and the more i see the worse it gets. i sit here open-mouthed in front of my computer. i feel sick.

anyone who’s made it here is probably already web-savvy enough to have seen the same things that i have, so i won’t post a comprehensive bunch of links. here’s a few of the latest though in case you haven’t made it to them yet.

i’ve mirrored a copy of the aaron broussard video, discussed on mefi and elsewhere. torrent file is mirrored here. (i just edited this – it used to be toward the bottom of the links, but i was afraid it might be lost in the shuffle, and besides, you should watch it before you read any further so you can put a human face to the rest of this news.)

google maps has updated satellite imagery. blue is water.

here’s a clearinghouse for the latest information out of new orleans. also see the indymedia new orleans page for breaking news.

the hellish reality of the superdome ‘shelter’. fema’s images must have been taken somewhere else, or at least before things went to hell.

offers of help from near and far were turned away by fema. (tribune has a paywall, use bugmenot.)

something awful’s richard “lowtax” kyanka put together $30k in katrina relief and paypal seized the funds. (incidentally, SA’s original servers are now underwater.)

some of CNN’s coverage is notable in that they manage to not only look beyond the bureacratic spin but publically display the disparity between the spin and reality.

editor and publisher talks about the official response.

maureen dowd, frank rich and paul krugman over at the nyt have written some pretty damning editorials about what this disaster says about the current administration.

elsewhere, the nyt reports about the new orleans police department coming unraveled – at least 200 resignations and two suicides. wapo identifies one as the department spokesperson.

here are several notable threads on metafilter. see also the collection at wikinews.

finally, amazon has set up a red cross relief fund donation page. this is the same one linked to from google and mefi, and has collected more than $7M so far. you can also volunteer time and effort even if you’re nowhere near the gulf – see the PeopleFinder page or the refugee database project.

(most links courtesy of google news, metafilter, boingboing, and random web crawling; apologies to anyone not credited.)

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