Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

New Orleans: Inside Story

To any­one who has been fol­low­ing the ter­rible events in New Orleans, this will make both inter­est­ing and con­cern­ing read­ing. Since Hurricane Katrina hit the area, its effects have been noth­ing less than cata­strophic, but now the winds have receded, the real prob­lem is a human one.

Michael Barnett, a.k.a. The Interdictor, works for DirectNIC, a large domain host­ing com­pany oper­at­ing out of New Orleans. He and his crew have been holed up in their 9^th-floor office suite, tasked with keep­ing the tens of thou­sands of hos­ted domains online. The build­ing the houses their data centre and office has its own diesel gen­er­at­ors, and as of today their Internet links are still up, and they are still online. His blog, now become the “Survival of New Orleans blog”, doc­u­ments the things he has done and wit­nessed since the hurricane’s impact.

From his office he and his crew broad­casts a web­cam feed (URL is a mir­ror and sub­ject to change) and takes pic­tures of what he can see below — loot­ing, mil­it­ary and police action, and the pro­gress of the flood­wa­ters. And a read of his blog shows things to be a lot worse than the main­stream media is reporting.

He reports police officers car­ry­ing out loot­ing of SUVs, ATMs and guns; emer­gency sup­plies being dropped off bridges by the National Guard, des­troy­ing most of them in the pro­cess; reports of armed civil­ians sur­round­ing police officers — one police source is quoted as saying,

“The people in the city are shoot­ing at the police. They’re upset that they’re not get­ting help quickly enough. The fire­men keep call­ing because they’re under fire. He doesn’t under­stand why the people are shoot­ing at the res­cuers. Here it is 5 days ago the Mayor said get out of town and nobody went and now they’re pissed.”

As he puts it,

“In case any­one in national secur­ity is read­ing this, get the word to President Bush that we need the mil­it­ary in here NOW. The Active Duty Armed Forces. Mr. President, we are los­ing this city. I don’t care what you’re hear­ing on the news. The city is being lost. It is the law of the jungle down here. The com­mand and con­trol struc­ture here is barely func­tion­ing. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s fault — I’m not sure it could be any other way at this point. We need the kind of logist­ical sup­port and infra­struc­ture only the Active Duty mil­it­ary can provide. The hos­pit­als are in dire straights. The police barely have any cap­ab­il­it­ies at this point. The National Guard is doing their best, but the situ­ation is not being con­tained. I’m here to help in any­way I can, but my cap­ab­il­it­ies are lim­ited and drop­ping. Please get the mil­it­ary here to main­tain order before this city is lost.”

The blog’s RSS feed is here.
Apparently it’s also pos­sible to listen to the National Guard radio chan­nel with Winamp here.

Update: I’ve been try­ing a bunch of dif­fer­ent feeds and this is the first I’ve found that works — it’s the Louisiana State Police radio chan­nel in Baton Rouge, the one cur­rently being tran­scribed on #interdictor-scanner (with occa­sional crosstalk on #interdictor-scanner2) on irc.freenode.net. Other feeds are lis­ted here.