What gives? It has been three hours since the Times Picayune’s breaking news weblog reported the closure of the levee breach that caused New Orlean’s flooding. Yet I don’t see the news online or on TV reports.

Katrina poetry blogging: Shawn Lea has started a poetry blog to help her “stiffle the bickerings of the media.” Although, she’ll not be blogging much tomorrow, as she’ll be doing her second 12-hour shift as a volunteer public information officer at the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

The Katrina People Finder Project: An effort to pull-together all of the disparate efforts to help loved ones find each other.

Quote:

Several dozen sites have been established to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina find their loved ones, and to allow people to report missing people. This creates a difficulty for people trying to locate missing persons - they need to search dozens of separate databases and message forums.

There are two main efforts going on:

PeopleFinderTech - automate data interchange between survivor databases

PeopleFinderVolunteer - coordinate a volunteer effort to input unstructured data by hand into structured databases.

If would like to participate in data entry, you probably want to begin on PeopleFinderVolunteer.

If you would like to participate in media outreach, please go to PeopleFinderPress.

See earlier post.

tags: katrina, katrina survivors

(via: David Weinberger)

Did I miss something? (See the Times-Picayune) First, did Sean Penn or Jesse Jackson get there first? Second, does this mean that we’ve officially moved from complaining about “people aren’t being evacuated fast enough?” to “people are being evacuated too far away?” Also, am I to understand that Rev. Jackson would prefer evacuees (he says we shouldn’t call them “refugees”) be placed on army bases rather than matched up with families and individuals who would like to host them in their homes? If so, I’ll wait until September 12 to say what I think about his suggestion.

Katrina refugees plan to stay, find jobs in Tennessee: (From today’s Tennessean) “Emergency management officials estimate as many as 20,000 people displaced by Hurricane Katrina have arrived in Tennessee in the past week, and the number could eventually rise to 30,000.”

tags: katrina, nashville, katrina evacuees

Bill Frist responds: (AP story) “Bill Frist took off his senator’s coat on Saturday and flew for New Orleans as a medical volunteer. But what he found among the thousands needing treatment from Hurricane Katrina was a rescue effort in chaos: patients sleeping on luggage conveyors, teams of nurses who didn’t know each other’s names and a total communication breakdown.”…”I’m not going to get into finger-pointing now. I did call for oversight hearings — I wouldn’t have done that if I weren’t concerned. We’ve got to do better.” The senator spent the day treating diabetics for low blood sugar and dealing with cases of high blood pressure and dehydration. Though he is a surgeon by training, there was no need to perform surgery on Saturday, he said. After overnighting in Nashville, Tenn., following his day in New Orleans, Frist planned to return to the Gulf Coast on Sunday to work in storm-ravaged areas of Mississippi and Alabama, as well as returning with supplies to New Orleans.”

tags: katrina aftermath, nashville, bill frist

An amazing map/wiki: Mash-up Google maps and a wiki and you have Scipionus.com, an incredible effort that is allowing people to explain block-by-block what they’ve seen in the Katrina-affected areas.

(via: Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, who observes: “Surfing around (the map), the devastation doesn’t seem as bad on the wiki as it does on TV. Houses a block or two from Lake Pontchartrain with no flooding, for instance. This shouldn’t be surprising. TV is only showing us the worst. The people in good enough shape to be entering info on the website are probably heavily selected towards those who fared well. The truth is probably somewhere in between.”)

tags: katrina aftermath, new orleans, scripionus.com, google maps

Corps of Engineers close levee breach: (Breaking news from the Times Picayune) “The breach in the 17th Street Canal levee that had put the city of New Orleans underwater was essentially closed early Sunday evening after days of work and the use of “ingenuity to the max,” a top U.S. Corps of Engineers general said.”

tags: katrina, new orleans

Nashville responds: There are specific requests for help now posted at the Nashville Helps Weblog and from the OpenChurches.com website, I learned that the 150 Nashville-area churches that are involved with Room in the Inn, a program that uses church facilities and volunteers to provide over-night lodging for the homeless during the winter months, are being contacted to assist in re-settling evacuees as the need develops.

This afternoon, I received an email from some folks at Hammock Publishing who learned of several families staying at an area motel who have lots of kids among them. We’ve already rounded up books and toys for them, but it suggests to me that (in addition to the 100,000+ people in Red Cross shelters) you can probably find similar situations at any motel within 400 miles of the Katrina-affected area.

Here’s a suggestion: Tomorrow, why not move your Labor Day cookout to the parking lot of one of these motels and get to know some of these families.

Insurgency: Police shot eight people carrying guns on a New Orleans bridge Sunday, killing five or six of them. The shootings took place on the Danziger Bridge, which connects Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

Update: The Army Corps of Engineers told AP that 14 contractors escorted by police were fired upon while crossing the Danziger Bridge, which spans a canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Corps spokesman John Hall told AP the contractors were on their way to launch barges into Lake Pontchartrain to help fix a breech in the 17th Street Canal.

Update II: Adding to the surreal battlefield nature of the what’s on the ground in New Orleans, CNN is reporting, “a rescue helicopter crashed northwest of downtown New Orleans Sunday evening. The pilot and crew were rescued, said those aboard another helicopter hovering above just after the crash. The mangled Eurocopter AS 332 Super Puma was lying on its side about four miles from downtown. The Coast Guard carried the crew from the scene on another helicopter.”

Habitat for Humanity responds: In the coming months, tens of thousands of church and civic groups from across the country will have the opportunity to reach out and assist individual families who are going to have to rebuild their homes — along with their lives. As someone who has participated (in a very unskilled way) with Habitat for Humanity projects, I know Katrina will be their biggest U.S. challenge ever. I can’t conceive of how complex this challenge will be, but know that family-by-family, house-by-house, person-to-person, is the quickest way to rebuild the homes of those without the insurance or means to react and respond like those who do.

Responses: As of today, more than 107,400 evacuees are in Red Cross shelters in nine states.

The Interdictor: I agree with Terry Heaton. The most compelling on-the-ground coverage of Katrina has been continuous entries on a LiveJournal site called The Interdictor being maintained by a local web-hosting company in New Orleans. Also, here’s a mirror feed of a webcam they are running which may surprise you when you see the dry streets and sporadic traffic in this specific area of downtown New Orleans.

tags: katrina response, katrina, new orleans

Archiving history: The Internet Archive is asking for help in documenting the Katrina disaster.

tags: katrina, internet archive

John Grisham responds: John Grisham and his wife have donated $5 million to create the Rebuild the Coast Fund. The fund will assist Mississippi residents and businesses. Grisham plans to hire a small staff to evaluate the requests for aid. The couple hopes to initially employ Coast residents who have lost their jobs and are familiar with the area.

(via: Shawn Lea)

tags: katrina, katrina response, john grisham, rebuild the coast fund