Saturday, September 03, 2005

I salute you Michael Barnett


From his blog The Interdictor Micahel Barnett and his team are the only reason you are reading this, as this website and most of the websites I manage are only on air due to their efforts.
DirectNic is an internet hosting company also providing domain name registration and DNS hosting based in New Orleans. I use them for most of my websites.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the company has a small team holed up in the 11th floor of their building running the servers on diesel generators.

Here are some quotes from his blog started during Hurricane Katrina and getting over 3000 hits an hour.
As has become their nightly routine, police formed up in 2 rows of 4 cars on Poydras at dusk and started driving around city blocks over and over. I saw some one car stop at a group of people camped out on a Camp Street sidewalk and question them, but then the cops drove off and left them alone.
Then we had to take a router down to city hall to try to get the city rolling on their internet. That included wading through water. God, the city is a mess when you head down Poydras that way. The Superdome looks like the Jenin refugee camp. God help this city. Whether or not it ought to be rebuilt is secondary to the real issue: can it be rebuilt? Looking around, I wouldn't know where or how to start. Good luck with that.
Dead bodies everywhere: convention center, down camp street, all over.
National Guard shoving water off the backs of trucks. They're just pushing it off without stopping, people don't even know it's there at first -- they drop it on the side in debris, there's no sign or distribution point -- people are scared to go near it at first, because the drop points are guarded by troops or federal agents with assault rifles who don't let people come near them, which scares people off. It is a mess. When people actually get to the water, they are in such a rush to get it that one family left their small child behind and forget about him until Sig carried him back to the family.
It's raining now and I guess that's a relief from the heat. It's hot as hell down there in the sun. Crime is absolutely rampant: rapes, murders, rape-murder combinations.


Please pray for New Orleans and its people. Thanks Michael and "Bigfoot" and the people who do what they can regardless of the circumstances.


Posted by: Jethro | 12:33 AM |