Category: Uncategorized

Michael Tisserand leaves New Orleans. I mention this primarily because (a) his book The Kingdom of Zydeco is on my bedside table, and (b) he’s evacuated to the Carencro home of my friend (and crabwalk reader) Scott Jordan.

From 2001: “…earlier this year the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked the potential damage to New Orleans [from a hurricane] as among the three likeliest, most castastrophic disasters facing this country. The other two? A massive earthquake in San Francisco, and, almost prophetically, a terrorist attack on New York City.”
If I’m living in San Francisco, I’m a little nervous right now.

I’m so glad that this cop will find time to watch DVDs in between rescue missions. Asshole.
“Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city,” stated Repent America director Michael Marcavage. “From ‘Girls Gone Wild’ to ‘Southern Decadence,’ New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. From the devastation may a city full of righteousness emerge,” he continued. Asshole.
“House Speaker Dennis Hastert dropped a bombshell on flood-ravaged New Orleans on Thursday by suggesting that it isn’t sensible to rebuild the city. ‘It doesn’t make sense to me,’ Hastert told the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago in editions published today. ‘And it’s a question that certainly we should ask’…’It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.'” Asshole.
And from the web site of Louisiana’s official racist, David Duke (duke.org, I don’t even want to honor it with a fucking link): “New Orleans descends into Africa-like Savagery!…One African-American was stopped by a TV news reporter. Carrying an armful of new designer jeans he was asked by the reporter if he was trying to save the inventory of his store. With a big toothy grin the looter replied, ‘This store be everybody’s now!’…The news reports from this morning on the WWL-TV website report that in their quest to loot, gangs of rampaging Negroes even raided a nursing home full of sick and infirmed elderly…I recently reached by phone a police officer friend in my home city of Mandeville, a community that has had tremendous wind and water damage, no electricity, no phone service, no alarms functioning, etc. He told me that there have been almost no incidents of looting or robbery of any kind. Mandeville is about 96 percent White.” Asshole.
Sorry, but everywhere you turn, there’s another fucking asshole.

Not that I ever had reason to, but when Nye was working on my college paper with me, I never would have picked him out as a guy to harass. Dude’s 6’3″, 220, and strong. (He always seemed even taller than that — maybe that was the rollerblades he was always wearing.) Which is why this seems to bizarre.

What a strange 24 hours.
As the last post says, I launched KatrinaCheckIn.org yesterday morning, around 2:30 a.m. By the time I woke up, around 8:00, I had CNN on the phone asking me to do an on-air interview the next morning. I also had visitors pouring in at the at-the-time-unbelievable rate of 1,500 an hour.
People were posting about their conditions and their loved ones — heartwrenching stuff in many cases. I was happy, because the site was fulfilling its purpose. There were a few other similiar sites set up at about the same time, but I think that KatrinaCheckIn.org was the largest of the independent ones. (Sites set up by the Times-Picayune and WWL-TV were probably the same size or a bit bigger.)
Anyway, I was frustrated when the site started crashing around 9:30 a.m. I wrote to my web host — which, for the record, is not the crappy one I recently tossed to the curb — to complain. The server ended up fixed, but it failed again a couple hours later. When the site was up, it was grindingly slow. I was a little mad.
Which was dumb. Because, as it turns out, I was the one crashing the server. Because KatrinaCheckIn.org was drawing in an absolutely insane number of hits.
In the end, my host — completely reasonably — had to take the site down. Turns out the site was on pace to pull in 84 million hits in a single day. (To put that in context, here’s a note from my host: “Companies like realtor.com have 60 load-balanced web servers, a large staff (and they spend 40 million a month) to do 20 million a day without issues. Yahoo’s Sept 11th memorial 3 day ‘event’ did 64 million hits over 3 days, took months to plan, was done on 500 servers and was fully staffed. That’s the kind of traffic that showed up here.”)
The wholesale bandwidth alone for a day’s traffic on KatrinaCheckIn.org was going to be $18,000. The site was generating 1,000 requests to the web server per second right before being shut down. (Again, from my host, “Wikipedia for example does a 1,000 requests/second on a 64-server cluster with about a dozen of those being squid proxy caches.” I don’t know what a squid proxy cache is — although it sounds totally awesome — but Wikipedia’s 64 servers compare quite favorably to the one server KatrinaCheckIn.org was on. And it shared that server with hundreds of other sites — crabwalk.com among them.)
So — what now? The terrific people at Textdrive are working on a few possible routes to bringing it back without melting servers and emptying my 401(k). May have word soon. I’m hopeful. But I wanted those who used the site to know I’m sorry it disappeared, and that I’m working to bring it back.
(FYI, CNN called late last night and cancelled the interview — presumably because they realized there was no site left to talk about.)

Here’s iron-clad proof that people should never tell me “hey, there should really be a web site that does X” at about 9 p.m. Because then I stay up until 2:30 a.m. making said web site.
So here it is: KatrinaCheckIn.org, a place for people to (a) say they survived the hurricane, thus lifting a gynormous weight off their friends’ shoulders, and (b) try to track down info on the missing.
For those of you with blogs, I would really appreciate a link to KatrinaCheckIn.org. The more people who are posting to it, the more useful and effective it will be.

Speaking of losing faith in humanity.
“Law enforcement efforts to contain the emergency left by Katrina slipped into chaos in parts of New Orleans Tuesday with some police officers and firefighters joining looters in picking stores clean…
“Some officers joined in taking whatever they could, including one New Orleans cop who loaded a shopping cart with a compact computer and a 27-inch flat screen television.
“Officers claimed there was nothing they could do to contain the anarchy, saying their radio communications have broken down and they had no direction from commanders.
“‘We don’t have enough cops to stop it,’ an officer said. ‘A mass riot would break out if you tried.’
“Inside the store, the scene alternated between celebration and frightening bedlam. A shirtless man straddled a broken jewelry case, yelling, ‘Free samples, free samples over here.’
“Another man rolled a mechanized pallet, stacked six feet high with cases of vodka and whiskey. Perched atop the stack was a bewildered toddler.
“Throughout the store and parking lot, looters pushed carts and loaded trucks and vans alongside officers. One man said police directed him to Wal-Mart from Robert’s Grocery, where a similar scene was taking place. A crowd in the electronics section said one officer broke the glass DVD case so people wouldn’t cut themselves.
“‘The police got all the best stuff. They’re crookeder than us,’ one man said…
“At least one officer tried futilely to control a looter through shame.
“‘When they say take what you need, that doesn’t mean an f-ing TV,’ the officer shouted to a looter. ‘This is a hurricane, not a free-for-all.’
“Sandra Smith of Baton Rouge walked through the parking lot with a 12-pack of Bud Light under each arm. ‘I came down here to get my daughters,’ she said, ‘but I can’t find them.’
“Some groups organized themselves into assembly lines to more efficiently cart off goods…Inside the store, one woman was stocking up on make-up. She said she took comfort in watching police load up their own carts.
“‘It must be legal,’ she said. ‘The police are here taking stuff, too.'”

Sometimes you lose faith in humanity.
“WWL-TV was reporting that a law enforcement officer was shot in the back of the head Tuesday afternoon on the west bank. The officer reportedly approached the looter near the intersection of Wall Boulevard and Gen. DeGaulle and, while talking to suspect, was shot in the back of the head by a second looter.”

Scariest thing: We’ve seen and heard almost nothing out of southern Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. Those are the low-lying areas near the mouth of the Mississippi where erosion was already eating away big chunks of land. They’re closer to the coast, and they’re even more vulnerable in a lot of ways than New Orleans.
On the WWL-TV feed online, they just said all of Plaquemines is under 15 feet of water. Which means anyone who stayed there is probably dead.
Horrifying tale from a Plaquemines school teacher who got away in time.
“Tanya went on to say what she worried about most — her students at Buras High, where she taught eighth grade English and literature. As an educator, she knew that many of the families had no mode of transportation…'[M]any of my students have never ever even been to New Orleans. They walk everywhere. They are poor, so poor,’ she sobbed.”

The vultures begin to circle: “Our barge casinos were hit hard by the hurricane. So, Mississippi government, we demand that you immediately legalize land-based casinos via emergency legislation! It’s not like you have anything better to do!”
(That said, I’ve never understood the reason for the silly legal distinction between land-based vs. river/lake/water-based casinos. If you’re going to legalize gambling, it seems silly to say it’s only okay if the gambling happens in a floating structure. Particularly since most of them are fastened to the river or lake bottom and functionally immobile.)