11/25/2005: Survival of New Orleans bloggers
The whole blogging concept has become, for the most part, little more than a collection of unnecessary vanity sites cluttering up the web with personal journals, self-promoting ads, and mindless pap (this one included). But when Katrina took out New Orleans this summer, a group of local web geeks took blogging to a new level.
Chances are you heard about these guys. Michael Barnett who goes by The Interdictor online and his cronies at directNIC, a New Orleans webhosting company, decided to stay put when the hurricane hit and ride it out. They started posting about the storm and they kept their live webcam running when most others in the area blacked out. But it was the aftermath and the atrocities helped along by the gross negligence of various government entities that really put them on the map.
Barnett & company kept the world posted on what was really happening in NOLA, when help didn't show up and people were dying in the stadium, the convention center, and the streets. They'd go out on rounds of the area and report back about the dead, the dying, and those trying to survive. They told us unbelievable stories of horrors that only hit the news a day or two later. They told us when supplies finally started arriving along with soldiers who sounded like it was a warzone rather than a relief effort, and they kept their power on against all odds as they documented the big ticket news items along with the little details of their odd campout life inside their office building.
There's something fascinating about natural disasters and the havoc and devastation they can bring. It's a sick fascination, but it's very compelling for many of us. It reminds us that we aren't all that - no matter how big & strong we get, we still can't begin to stand up to nature when she gets upset; and when there's widespread destruction and death, it touches that place inside us that feels such things so hard, and it hurts. But when the disaster is compounded by a series of screwups by those who are supposed to help fix things - whatever the cause - it escalates to a new level of incredulity.
I hope that Michael Moore is on the case about the 2005 hurricanes and the bigger mess that the officials made of them, but in my opinion the guys behind the Survival of New Orleans blog are among the real heroes of the year. They're the Woodward & Bernstein of the disaster, and I hope they're going to become a book, movie, whatever they can get from it. They brought us truths that might not have come out otherwise, and they let us live through it with them from our safe havens far away.
There's always one pic that gets to you most in these things. For me it was this one, from the bloggers. When supplies finally started showing up, they had a series of shots showing piles of bottled water dumped onto the streets like garbage, and people gathering it up to take back to wherever they were staying. This shot is as heart-wrenching as the 1963 photo of little "John-John" Kennedy saluting his daddy's coffin. The caption reads "I never saw little kids get so excited about a bottle of water"
The bloggers were interactive and accessible, answering many emails and IMs and often chatting on IRC. A few times they turned their cam onto their monitors to show the amount of IMs coming in: it was like salt pouring out of a shaker, blam blam blam blam blam. Sometimes they'd hold up signs like "hey Dad" or show us what they were eating. Apparently someone asked this time if they had protection.. uhhh yep
Sleep dep was common for the guys: here's a quick dawn blog entry being made before a much-needed catnap, and one of the early relief convoys finally coming into the neighborhood
Check out the Survival of New Orleans blog - it's deceptively huge, with tons of photos and first-hand accounts of everything that went down. New Orleans and the other devastated areas are still in big trouble even though they've largely left the nightly news but people don't want to watch anymore now that the heavy drama's over, and that's a shame. Please do what you can to help.
