Hurricane Katrina Victims Need Your Help

Red­crosshelp

I’ve been riv­eted by
the images of dev­as­ta­tion on CNN and as time passes and the human
suf­fer­ing increases, it becomes even more clear there was no dis­as­ter
recov­ery plan­ning in place.The recov­ery will take months, so it’s never too late to give to those in need.

Here’s how you can help:

Amer­i­can Red Cross

Vic­tims of Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina are attempt­ing to recover from the mas­sive
storm that is still mak­ing its way across the Mid-Atlantic States.
Amer­i­can Red Cross vol­un­teers have been deployed to the hard­est hit
areas of Katrina’s destruc­tion, sup­ply­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands vic­tims
left home­less with crit­i­cal neces­si­ties. By mak­ing a finan­cial gift to
Hur­ri­cane 2005 Relief, the Red Cross can pro­vide shel­ter, food,
coun­sel­ing and other assis­tance to those in need.

Hur­ri­cane­Help — Find sur­vivors of Hur­ri­cane Katrina

This is a ser­vice to help con­nect Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina vic­tims with their
friends and fam­ily. Please respect those affected by this tragedy and
only sub­mit accu­rate, rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion. This is not an offi­cial
infor­ma­tion site.

Social Source Software’s Kat­rina Peo­pleFinder Project in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Omidyar.net

Refugees can search 20 web sites for lost rel­a­tives and still miss their entry on the 21st web site. There is a need to com­bine all the refugee data from big data­bases like Red Cross, large post­ing forums like Craigslist and many other sources on the web. The Kat­rina Peo­pleFinder Project seeks to cre­ate a sin­gle repos­i­tory com­bin­ing as many sources of refugee data as pos­si­ble from all over the web with­out inter­rupt­ing exist­ing momentum.

We need help for both reg­u­lar peo­ple and soft­ware engi­neers. Every­body is crit­i­cal to build­ing a cen­tral repos­i­tory of ALL the refugee records we can find on the web. The Social Source Foun­da­tion, Civic­Space Labs and Salesforce.com Foun­da­tion are coor­di­nat­ing hun­dreds of peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing Craigslist and Earthlink.

Poignant tes­ti­mony by pub­lic offi­cials and others:

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin — raw and uncensored

Joan Touzet, orig­i­nally from New Orleans, has posted the full uncen­sored audio,
which is raw in lan­guage and emo­tion. Nagin dis­cusses the cur­rent
vio­lence and chaos in the city, and the lack of effec­tive action by
FEMA and the fed­eral gov­er­ment; Nagin accuses the Gov­er­nor and FEMA of
think­ing too small.

Read Chris Waigl’s tran­script here

This video on Crooks & Liars is a must-see:

The tear-filled eyes of Jef­fer­son Parish Pres­i­dent Aaron
Brous­sard as he was inter­viewed by Tim Russert on today’s Meet the
Press.

Pub­lic pho­tos on Flickr tagged with Kat­rina (over 4,000)

Joi Ito talks about The under­priv­i­leged vic­tims of Kat­rina

I won­der about the alle­ga­tions of treat­ing the under­priv­i­leged vic­tims
as more “expend­able”. I real­ize this is quite a harsh alle­ga­tion, but
some­thing that I won­der about none the less.

The
armed forces recruits mostly from the under­priv­i­leged class, and it is
they who fight the wars. It is time to give back.

Learn more about the impact of Katrina:

New Orleans LA post-Katrina Intel Dis­sem­i­na­tion Wiki!

This wiki was setup to fac­tor the tons of ran­dom bits of infor­ma­tion flow­ing out of New Orleans in totally dis­or­ga­nized chunks, and being repeated around the inter­net in var­i­ous forms. Blogs are not up to the task of dis­till­ing this info in a use­ful way, so we’ve setup this ad-hoc project at nola-intel.org to try and keep track of all of this.

Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina — Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Many esti­mates pre­dict that Kat­rina was the costli­est storm in his­tory
to strike the United States. In terms of fatal­i­ties it was the sec­ond
dead­liest named storm to hit the US, and may be declared the dead­liest
after more casu­al­ties are dis­cov­ered. Kat­rina also caused the first
total dev­as­ta­tion of a major Amer­i­can city since the 1906 San Fran­cisco earth­quake and sub­se­quent fires.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Kat­rina