Direct reports comming from livejournaler from downtown New Orleans

If you are interested in knowing about what’s happening in New Orleans right now from someone who is not a paid drama queen for "The Media", read on.

I am a proud member of somethingawful and this site is hosted by a company out of New Orleans called Zipa, which is owned by a company called DirectNIC. I am mentioning and linking them here because they are really quite amazing. You will agree with me on this one after you are done reading this.

Some DirectNIC employees decided to stay and not evacuate so they could keep their diesel powered generator running so the sites they were hosting could stay up. Somethingawful and about a thousand other sites have been running on diesel fuel for the past 3 days. This makes DirectNIC a really great group of dudes and they are actually making the news since no one else is doing this kind of thing.

Anyway, on to the amazing bit: one of the employees, Michael Barnett, started an online journal about what is going on in downtown New Orleans, complete with webcam, photos and constantly updated journal entries about what he is seeing and experiencing. It's making the news as well because it's supposedly the only source for actual information from downtown. The link to his journal is here.

The news he is reporting is not good news at all. There's some pretty scary things going on. Here's some of his journal entries from today;

- "Dead bodies everywhere."

- "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."

- "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."

Cheers to DirectNIC for doing this and good luck surviving... whatever the hell is going on there. I am watching the webcast right now and it's of the street outside. You can see someone carrying stuff (looting?) about once every 2 minutes. Sometimes a car or two, but never police.

Also, this was posted anonymously: "Looks like hundreds of people consider you a hero. To me, you and your little company are racist self-righteous pricks playing survivalist fantasy games and hoarding critical supplies from a city in desperate need. What pisses me off even more is that you are doing this for an ISP, and act like it's more important to keep some company's server going than to have power for a hospital running short on everything." Whoever posted this comment on the livejournal can offically go fuck themselves.

edit: Wow, this livejournal is seriously everywhere right now! Here's also a page of streams and police scanner broadcasts. Click here. This is fucked up.