The more I read about the fallout from Hurricane Katrina, the more riled up I get. I want to help, but there’s not much that I can do from the other side of the country. I’m sending $140 to relief efforts (the money that I will be paid from the piece that I filed yesterday to Wired News). Half of it is going to my journalistic bretheren down at The Sun Herald, where my Columbia classmates Michael Keller and Josh Norman in Biloxi to help in their coverage. I’m sitting here in my office in San Francisco writing about stuff that really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, wanting to do more.
I’m not a doctor, I’m not a engineer, but I’m a journalist. My job is to inform people and to communicate the news. On 9/11, after getting over the initial shock of what happened I ran down to the newsroom of The Daily Californian and spent the whole day on the phone calling nearly the entire Berkeley engineering department trying to get someone to explain to me physically how it happened that the building collapsed. I was a science and technology writer. That’s my trade. I can put it to good use. Unfortunately there’s really not a whole lot that I can do from here without being in New Orleans as a journalist. They probably have more journalists than they know what to do with. In fact, I just got an email from the Columbia 2005 alumni list-serv from a dude in New York who’s got an extra plane ticket down there to start stringing. I can’t do that, but I want to help.
These guys are helping the world know what’s going down there. I’m sending the other $70 to further relief efforts with the Red Cross.
If you don’t realize how fucked up things are, go listen to this interview with the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Negin (transcript)
And finally, occasionally the foreign press gives you a tidbit that really hammers things home:
Le secrétaire à la sécurité intérieure, Michael Chertoff, a reconnu que les secouristes faisaient face à d’énormes difficultés, la région ayant été frappée par plusieurs catastrophes successives : le cyclone, puis la rupture des digues et les inondations. La surface dévastée, a-t-il rappelé, est équivalente à 235 000 km2 carrés, soit près de la moitié de la surface de la France.
“The devastated area, he recalled, is equivalent to 235,000 square kilometers, nearly half of the area of France.”
