Pfizer is offering free prescription drugs to Katrina survivors. I also heard from a friend who told me that Time Warner converted some trucks that they normally use for promotional events to help provide on the scene Internet access to Katrina survivors. The trucks have a satellite link to the Internet and a bunch of terminals inside. Time Warner employees took out all of the promotional stuff, loaded up with food and water, and headed to the disaster zone to help out. ...
It seems like every day, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina offers up more outrages (created by humans), and my energy for commenting at length is ebbing. Some outbound links: FEMA prevents volunteers from setting up low power radio station to serve refugees in the Astrodome. In all of this, the thing that pisses me off the most remains the self-congratulation from various government officials. You guys have done a horrible job. Quit pretending like you didn’t. A Katrina timeline from Think Progress, and another from Josh Marshall. NBC anchor Brian Williams reports that law enforcement officers and soldiers in New Orleans are barring press access to some areas of the city and that there are incidents of intimidation against reporters. A legitimate-seeming first hand description of the refugees/detainees in Oklahoma.
I have no use for an iPod nano, and yet I want one. It’s sleek, gorgeous, and tiny, and it has a color display. The iPod nano goes for $199 in the 2 gig model and $249 in the 4 gig model. The iPod Mini is no more, being that it is inferior to the iPod nano in every way and costs only slightly less. The question that immediately sprung to mind was how the iPod nano compares to competing music players. It was then that I realized just how much better Apple’s product line is than Creative’s. Apple has three models, iPod (20 gig or 60 gig), iPod nano (4 gig or 5 gig), and iPod Shuttle (512mb or 1 gig). The form factors and use cases for the players are completely different. If I were buying a music player, I’d have no trouble figuring out which of them I’d like to have. ...
The BBC reports that Yahoo’s Hong Kong operation helped the Chinese police track down a journalist who published a Communist Party memo. The guy wound up with a 10 year prison sentence. Reporters Without Borders has more.
I think it would be silly to privatize disaster relief, but it’s hard to miss how much better corporations did in planning for and responding to Katrina than the government did at any level. When President Bush looks for a replacement for FEMA chief Michael Brown, he ought to go beyond his list of cronies and hire someone from corporate America who has experience with this sort of thing. Entergy and other power companies have done an amazing job restoring power. Not only have they done well in terms of customers served, but they have an excellent triage plan that enables them to turn on the power to crucial buildings first as well as to serve as many customers as possible by getting the easiest work out of the way before tackling harder problems. Then today I read that Wal-Mart had 45 truckloads of relief supplies prepared in Mississippi before Katrina made landfall. Wal-Mart supplied free computers to every shelter in Orange, TX so that refugees could take advantage of resources that are available on the Internet for finding relatives and keeping up with the news. I’m sure the company has done so elsewhere as well. ...
Apparently the reports of Potemkin food distribution stations set up for President Bush’s aerial survey of New Orleans were misreported.
Mark Schmitt describes the willingness of people to place their faith in President Bush in terms of cognitive dissonance without describing it as such: But there’s a factor here that I think is always neglected in these polls: There’s always a thin line between what we believe and what we wish to be true, or need to believe to be true. Unless you’ve given up completely on the Bush presidency, you naturally want to think the president and the government are doing the best job they can do with the disaster, because to believe otherwise is kind of terrifying. ...
Did you know that Hurricane Katrina struck before New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin had a chance to distribute hurricane preparedness DVDs to New Orleans’ low income population that would have let them know in advance that in the event of an evacuation, they would be left to their own devices? This is not a man due much respect.
The large building in this picture is a high school in Plaquemines Parish. My sister was talking to a family who lives near the school, and they told her that the school is not flooded. As you can see from the picture, the building is actually built on top of columns that enable it to survive even extreme flooding.
It seems to me that one of the most important tools for people who live in New Orleans is satellite/aerial photography that they can use to see the state of their residences. I’m trying to compile a list of sites with such photos: Katrina Image Warehouse provides a number of views of the hurricane damage, including the ability to look up specific addresses using the “check my house” form New Orleans Flood Map, current and maximum water depths throughout New Orleans Space Imaging IKONOS photos. These images are zoomable and scrollable. More of the uptown area is covered than in the Digital Globe photo I linked to the other day Google Earth Hurricane Katrina Imagery (The Katrina photos are overlays converted from the NOAA aerial photos linked below) DigitalGlobe satellite photo of New Orleans. (Before photo.) GlobalSecurity.org collection of satellite photos NOAA aerial photos (includes much of the hurricane-damaged areas, including southeast Louisiana and Mississippi) Plaquemines Parish hurricane damage photos GlobeXplorer disaster photos TerraServer satellite photos of affected areas USGS Landsat photos ORBIMAGE satellite photos Kathryn Cramer has a number of useful resources for assessing Katrina damage Google Maps now provides access to the Katrina flooding overlay from last Wednesday (the same satellite photo I linked to originally) Please post any additional similar links in the comments and I’ll add them to this post. ...