WHO COME RESCUE WITH GUNS?

We went scouting into the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans today to see if there was anything there we could usefully do. There is not.


The 9th Ward had the highest percentage of black home ownership in America. Momma D, over in the 7th Ward, says her mom worked for 50 cents a day to build her house. Many in the 9th Ward aren't any different.

On the way in, the upper 9th and lower 9th further from the levee breach is the territory where people were left on their roofs without food or water for days. When you meet these people and they talk about it, you can still see the fear in their eyes. There are huge messages painted on some of the street intersections that say things like SAVE US and WE NEED HELP.

Some of the people who managed to get to dry ground were held at gunpoint for over a day before being evacuated, whites first, until the crowd remaining was 95% black. Other people who managed to get to dry ground managed to get onto Interstate 10 to walk out of the city. They were stopped on the Mississippi Bridge by Gretna police who reportedly fired on or over the crowd not wanting these people, who the media were portraying as dangerous looters, to go into their white neighbourhood.

In the words of Momma D...”WHO COME RESCUE WITH GUNS?”

- Geoffrey Young

Report from Hammond/Ponchatoula

We held the first AGM for the Resource Action Group at a house in Hammond this afternoon and which was attended also by Mr Richard Lajeunesse, who is a heroic trucker from La Belle Province. RAG, and ourselves as part of it, have several rental trucks dispersed throughout the region. They are all being used and are badly needed but we have decided to pull most of them back in as we are just plain out of money and these trucks are expensive. We joined Kevin on several deliveries between Ponchatoula and New Orleans.

We spent several days between the houses in Hammond and Ponchatoula. Time was spent writing press releases and trying to raise money for Resource Action Group. We got a request for 5-10 thousand contractor sized garbage bags and a couple days were spent calling around to suppliers and manufacturers looking for a sizeable handout. The bags are necessary to remove mould and mould affected items from houses due to the toxic nature of the mould. It is also needed to clean up all the asbestos. Almost half of the roofs in New Orleans are covered with asbestos shingles. It is VERY important that we come up with these bags. Dow Chemical, I think it was their national PR office, seemed on the phone to think we were insane, probably because, as he said, Dow has never given any in kind donation to such a thing.

- Geoffrey Young

Report from the 9th Ward

At the levee breech in the lower 9th Ward, we ran into Donald Lindsay. He is a football coach and school teacher who grew up in the 9th . He gave us a house to house tour of where he grew up, each of the houses being as pictured above. His grandparents house was a concrete slab. The house where he was babysat as a child was several doors down, across the street, on top of another house. The body squad has not been by yet and, as you can see, anybody left in the neighbourhood close to the hole when the levee gave is likely dead.


FEMA has offered the members of Donald's family a whopping $2000 each to turn a piece of the rubble pictured above into a life. They say there will be more later. Meanwhile all of these people's money is running out and the survivors are scattered across all of America. There are no schools open, there weren't enough to begin with, so Donald is working as a roofer.

We will post audio of the interview with Donald taken as we were touring his destroyed neighbourhood once we get hosting space.

- Geoffrey Young

Report from New Orleans

We have spent our time in New Orleans installing, fixing, and trying to track down a bunch of small radios that shoot the internet around. These are called mesh nodes. Some were put on people's houses, one at a bed and breakfast, and there is even a park not too far from the French Quarter with wireless internet. We also did some tech support for a community level radio station and installed a mesh node enabling them to webcast.

The radios were provided by CU Wireless from Champaign-Urbana, who also very graciously donated $2000 toward our travel costs. Sasha Meinrath and CU Wireless were responsible for getting us placed and connected down here in the first place and arranged for safe border passage from the US State Department and FCC.

There are a few others working on the same sort of thing here but it's very hard to get any sort of concentrated effort because there is just too much to be done.

Gordon has his hands on two mobile satellite units from Wanderpod and a lot of time is spent in debate trying to figure out what to do with these things and how. One of them connects to our tech truck (courtesy of Resource Action Group) but is probably more useful somewhere else. Gordon seems set on Houma (First Nation) and he and Will were out looking at a camp in Covington which is just starting up, connected with the folks at plenty.org.

- Geoffrey Young