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DirectNIC Crisis Manager Braves the Chaos of New Orleans
Aleks Clark writes "The Interdictor, a DirectNIC crisis manager, is currently braving the madness of post-Katrina New Orleans. Server rescues, OC4 repairs and live video and audio feeds abound as he and his crew battle the odds with what seems like the entire internet at his back. 1700+ People are tracking his blog, and IRC channels are full to capacity."
...until you realize how many people are using blogs and other internet services as their only means of communication.
Tim
They keep em up through a hurricane, flooding, riots and the /. editors decide to take the servers down themselves...
Sick of stupidity? http://www.patentlystupid.com
as a directnic employee working remotely from Manhattan I have been working round the clock to aid these guys any way I can.
we are on freenode in #interdictor
we have had a lot of support, thank you guys.
as far as directnic employees, we have made contact with most, we are still missing our entire accounting/HR department and many of our support people are MIA, we can only assume they got out.
as a company, the majority of our employees are currently homeless and are regrouping in Florida currently.
They are pretty hardcore there, not sure they can even get out now..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
AmeriCares:americares.org
RoommateClick.comSite offering a service for the New Orleans homeless, free of charge.
Baton Rouge Area Foundation(BRAF): 877.387.6126 or braf.org
Episcopal Relief & Development: 1-800-334-7626 or www.er-d.org
United Methodist Committee on Relief: 1-800-554-8583 or gbgm-umc.org/umcor/emergency/hurricanes/2005
Salvation Army: 1-800-SAL-ARMY or www.salvationarmyusa.org
Catholic Charities: 1-800-919-9338 or www.catholiccharitiesusa.org
FEMA Charity tips: www.fema.gov/rrr/help2.shtm
National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster: www.nvoad.org
Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: www.la-spca.org
Operation Blessing: 1-800-436-6348 or www.ob.org
America's Second Harvest: 1-800-344-8070 or www.secondharvest.org
Adventist Community Services: 1-800-381-7171 or www.adventist.communityservices.org
Christian Disaster Response: 1-941-956-5183 or 1-941-551-9554 or www.cdresponse.org/cdrhome.html
Christian Reformed World Relief Committee: 1-800-848-5818 or www.crwrc.org
Church World Service: 1-800-297-1516 or www.churchworldservice.org
Convoy of Hope: 1-417-823-8998 or www.convoyofhope.org
Lutheran Disaster Response: 1-800-638-3522 or www.elca.org/disaster
Mennonite Disaster Service: 1-717-859-2210 or www.mds.mennonite.net
Nazarene Disaster Response: 1-888-256-5886 or www.nazarenedisasterresponse.org
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance: 1-800-872-3283 or www.pcusa.org/pda
Southern Baptist Convention - Disaster Relief: 1-800-462-8657, ext. 6440 or www.namb.net
Except that as far as I know from friends that were able to contact me, the cops are looting stuff like gun shops and food shops. Unlike the other looters that steal money (wtf is the point of money in New Orleans right now, eh), and non-critical supplies.
Also, you described the economic side of price gouging - fair enough. Now, IN THE MEANTIME, whilst the supplies are being shipped in, nobody can pay for their foodstuffs. They die. Congratulations.
Your worst team meeting, software development project or vacation gone wrong is 1/1,000,000 as complex as what the relief personnel are handling. You may have been thwarted by snow on the road, delayed flights, crashing computers, lost data, wrong cellphone numbers or ill coworkers; these guys are dealing with non-existant roads, riots, gun shots, power loss and starvation. This is spread across 50,000 square miles of cities turned lakes. None of us can possibly fathom the details evacuating 60,000 people must be, tending to their transportation and health through an almost literal warzone.
We may know it's complex, but unless we're intimitely involved we cannot accurately critique the relief efforts. It'd be comparable to Brian Williams analyzing the Linux kernel structure, or attempting to explain fighter tactics. Without first-hand knowledge, opinions on sophisticated matters are worthless. As slashdotters who regularly tear apart the mass media on technical inaccuracies, we all should know this well
We are NOT full to capacity, please feel free to participate.
irc.freenode.net #interdictor
There are several sub-channels, such as #interdictor-chat for discussion/dialogue, #interdictor-scanner for a transcript of the radio scanner, etc.
We are also trying to track any news and information we can find to provide a summarized glimpse of the events as they happen. We're avoiding things that are already available through major news outlets, but any first-hand accounts, independent news sources, eye-witness information, international news, etc. (anything you couldn't find through, say, Fox News or MSNBC), please don't hesitate to help out.
Moo
http://americablog.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/gu itar-710427.jpg
Pictures of bodies floating by are currently on the front page of the New York Times.
I posted the following quote on the previous article, with no conclusions, but it was modded down by people who dislike facts they disagree with. Additionally there's more information now and I am posting a link to the original article from editor and publisher:
"It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us." June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, in the Times-Picayune
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/artic le_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313
The above article also details what cuts were done by Bush to the SELA grants (for levees in New Orleans), which, by the way, were started and funded in 1995.
Additionally it appears that Louisiana should have been "high on the list of FEMA's biggest disaster mitigation grant program" but received nothing. Here's the article that states this: http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-09-2 8/cover_story2.html
Now, as before, mod this post into oblivion so that you don't have to see Bush smiling and playing the guitar yesterday while bodies float around. I'm not sure what disgusts me more -- him doing that, or people closing their eyes to truth.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
"Hell, the dikes wouldn't have overflowed if the repair money to fix them hadn't been diverted to the dept of homeland "security" last summer."
Not true. I guess it makes for a more dramatic story if they leave out the facts. Simple fact is, if the money had not been diverted, the money would of been spent on a project which would still not have been completed and the city would have still be lost. But, telling half truths on the news makes for a much better story. I heard this from an Army Corps of Engineers representative on the news this morning. According to him, even if they had started the project in 2002, the project probably would not have been completed until at least 2008. This is 2005, last I checked, which means the project probably wouldn't of started until about a year ago, which means we would of flushed that money with the rest of the city.
He's not talking about food. Or maybe he is. In any event, here is an example:
A hurricane comes through. Houses are destroyed. People come in to rebuild knowing that they will get rich. Governor sets a price cap. Builders know that they can go elsewhere and get better profits with less hastle, so they leave.
The people who come into an area to rebuild need an economic incentive. If you want to remove that incentive, fine. But then you have to mandate that people rebuild regardless of their wishes.
Unless you are going to have government contracts to rebuild things, you can't remove free market incentives.
Now, things like food, clothing, tents should be provided, free of charge, by the government. No if's ands or buts. We spend millions to provide MREs to Africa/Asia; spending billions on our own people shouldn't be a problem.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
The OC4 will be fiber all the way to a major exchange building and most of that sort of stuff is way up top. If its a typical telco, they have lots of batteries for the OC4 gear because they tend to build battery packs as if they were for the exchange gear which takes far more power. The result is there is a very expensive fiber switch thats has a direct fiber connection from very far away (maybe as far Dallas or Atlanta) and it has power. The risk to that type of connection is that sometimes the water will cause noise in the fiber splices or the generator will die or someone will break the upstream link while trying to fix something far away.
Merchandise sitting on shelves (and gas sitting in storage tanks!) does not magically cost the business 3x more.
No, but the merchandise they have to buy to replace that merchandise does.
If a business can't make enough on the merchandise on their shelves to purchase replacements, they go out of business.
Price controls are counter-productive.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
About the fact that this was a relatively minor disaster that was experienced and this was how an entire country, the (arguably) richest in the world both in terms of economy and innovation was able to deal with it?
What if we had a larger disaster on our hands such as price/rarity of gas skyrocketing to the point where farmed goods can no longer be delivered in quantity to major metropolitain areas?
As far as the crime situation goes, I can "understand" the looting and mugging, but why the raping? What racial/moral justification is there for that?
I dropped my donation off at the Red Cross for a lack of anything better to do in order to help. My respect goes out to the people risking their ass to get aid to that place.
Maybe I sound tin foil hattish but prior to this hurricane footage, all i was really expecting to see post-hurricane was generic flood photos and cheesy clips of people grabbing TVs from shop windows, not stories of cops siphoning gas from cars for their patrol vehicles and stealing ammo from stores before other people do while "rape gangs" walk around.
Truly a sad day for the human race. Maybe we'll look back on how *we* behaved when we look at other countries and remark about how "uncivilized" they are in the future.
Let's pretend that I own a gas station with a 10,000 gallons of capacity in my underground tanks.
Decision time.
Option one:
I keep the price of my gas at $1.25 until I run out. I lose no money because that gas is already bought and paid for. At the bottom of my tank I find that I have raked in $12,500 - before paying any other expenses such as insurance, electricity, employee salaries and benefits, taxes and so on. Figuring my two cent/gallon profit I have earned $200 for myself.
But wait! I now need to replace 10,000 gallons of gas which will now cost me $25,000. Even assuming I had free utilities, labor and overhead my last storage tank fillup would only allow me to buy 5,000 gallons of gas. A couple more price hikes and I'll be out of business and nobody will be able to buy gas from me because I'll be closed.
Option two:
I jack the prices up to match what I expect my next delivery will cost so I can keep the tanks full and stay in business. Unfortunately, no matter what I charge I'll never make more than two cents/gallon profit - and that doesn't count all of the people who feel entitled to rip me off because I'm "gouging". Or don't come in and buy my fountain drinks and candy bars which is where 80% of my profits come from.
Yes, I could refrain from "gouging" but a quick failure of the business is a definite certainty.
Anti-gouging laws are one of the sillier things ever supplied by pandering politicians to stupid, demanding citizens. During normal times I can charge $15,000 for a generator and nobody will care because they'll go to Home Depot and buy one for $700. I would be in violation of the law but nobody would care because nobody wants to buy generators. But when the disaster strikes and everybody sells out of $700 generators (which are covered with dust because they sat on the shelves for 2 1/2 years because nobody thought that the designation "hurricane zone" actually meant something") and they see my stock of $15,000 generators (covered in dust because in 10 years nobody except the government wanted to buy my generators at a price so far above market) and I would be the greatest villian in the history of mankind, even if I -lowered- my price from $15,000 to $14,000.
Then you have a shortage. In times of normalcy 100 people are willing to buy a generator at $700 and everybody who wants one gets one. In time of natural disaster 50,000 people want a generator at $700 and 49,999 people are SOL because the first person in line buys all of them then sells all 100 out of the back of his truck for $2,000 each. Just because the government says that generators are only worth $700 doesn't mean that that is what they will be sold for.
No, but it is what prevents our economy from looking like Cuba (no food is available), Russia (no heating fuel is available) or Canada (9 months of waiting for a mammogram).
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
This is why I think we need to take a deeper look at ourselves:
1: We knew Katrina was coming...
2: We knew it was big...really huge and as such, the damage would be enormous...
3: We knew that some residents would not beat the time required to vacate Louisiana, may be because of complacency or the traffic mess...
4: We had numbers of those who had managed to escape. We even knew where they were to be found...
5: We even knew the geography of New Orleans, so we could know where to go and how to get there...
6: We knew much more via satellites...since we take ourselves as being the most advanced country on earth...!
But...
1: There was 100% chaos in Louisiana...
2: ...because we seem to have been caught off guard...!
3: Dead bodies lying on the streets?
4: Desperate people walking in s**t?
5: Looting as if this is Somalia?
6: Despite all this, we have politicians ranting up their rhetoric...heck...folks are dying...all you hear is "we are doing all we can..." And this is AMERICA the great? Can some one tell me how a similar catastrophe would be any different in a third world country?
Looting for food and water, maybe beating somebody up that went wacko all of a sudden (posing a risk for you and the people around), maybe I can see, but what justification can you give for, "Whoops! All hell is breaking loose, water's everywhere, I gots to get my freak on!"
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
It was interesting to see in that blog that what I've heard elsewhere is confirmed: Police are doing much of the looting.
Ok, let's be clear about this, because both your and the blog's statements are pretty inflammatory and not accurate.
In a declared emergency, the police are allowed and in fact in some cases even required to commandeer what they see fit to maintain order and public safety. That does include guns and food. This is not "looting". The store owners are all reimbursed by the city and state later.
This happens all the time, but the one instance I can remember that was pretty heavily publicized was during that bank robbery and shootout in Los Angeles a while back, where the police were so outgunned that they went to a gun store during the gunfight and picked it clean. This is part of their duty; they have the authority and responsibility to commandeer items required to do their job during a public emergency.
It's really no different than a firefighter breaking somebody's door down during a fire. I mean, are they breaking and entering? Do you have them arrested for tresspassing? Obviously not - they're doing what they need to do to get the job done, and they're legally allowed to do it.
I think it's actually pretty tasteless for this guy to write something like "who knows what their real motives are?"... I mean, these are the guys out there in the direct line of fire trying to protect and feed a whole lot of innocent people who haven't eaten or drunk anything in 3 or 4 days. They're getting shot at (and hit) by street thugs for no reason, and they're doing their best to restore order in a clear vacuum of leadership and without nearly enough manpower.
The levy that broke WAS upgraded to withstand the cat4 hurricanes.
And the project to upgrade the levys has been going since 1965! This is not the federal governments fault. If the dam levy is so important to people in New Orleans, have them come up with the money to fix it themselves!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Heartless bastard reporting for duty.
New Orleans has been sinking into the swamp for years. The city is essentially a hole in the ground, surrounded by water. You know why the cemetaries have above ground caskets? They're 15 feet below sea level. The hole fills up with water as fast as they can dig it.
If we rebuild, it *will* happen again. And then what? We pay to have it rebuilt again? If the city was next to an active volcano, would you be saying we should rebuild it?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
please. get a dose of reality. he *is* supporting the government/military/Red Cross. he's supporting a data backbone, for christ's sake. have you actually read the damn blog? they're wading through the water setting up links to the city hall. they're coordinating between deisel runs, city hall, and the police force to make sure that people can keep in contact with the outside! do you know what the hell an OC3 even is? for christs sake, get a grip on reality and get over yourself.
he's getting fuel runs because the police precincts are *abandoned*, and his office *isn't*. he's getting fuel runs because his infrastucture is *still intact*. the police and military are helping *him*, because he's got his shit together and is keeping data trunk lines running.
and just for the record, blogging, as a one-to-many means of communication, is the most efficient way that these folks are able to communicate to everybody else. they don't have time to sift through emails and make phone calls, so they're using their blogs as a broadcasting mechanism.
God, I hate self-possessed tards who don't appreciate the work that other people do, and don't know what an OC3 or a metro-area disaster recovery plan is.
for someone with such a low UserID and who, apparently, has been around here for a long time, I'm surprised that you don't understand the importance of keeping telephone lines up in emergency situations.
To any moderators reading, please mod parent post as Troll.
interdictor map.
I've only got a little on there now, but will add more (like other flood lines, etc) if people send me email with coordinates to gmap AT danREMOVEshockley.com
I've got a simple click-to-find-coordinates map at:
Test Map Coords
Lose essential liberties to get temporary safety = get only hassles and security theater.
This article tends to contradict your assertion. It kind of sounds like the corp was in fact going around Louisiana begging for money to do emergency repairs. Not clear if the repairs would have salvaged the levies that collapsed but one was on the canal levee that failed. When it comes to levees the old saying "a stitch in time" usually applies. If you let a crack develop or let it sink, when flood water starts spilling at the weak spot it quickly takes out the whole thing.
"Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune:"
"The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don't get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can't stay ahead of the settlement," he said. "The problem that we have isn't that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can't raise them."
"The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain."
@de_machina
This is NOT libertarianism!
THIS IS ANARCHY in the city! NOTHING LESS.
ANARCHY ANARCHY ANARCHY!
According to http://www.m-w.com/ Anarachy:
1 a : absence of government b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority
Libertarianism involves a civilized society. I am sure you can Google to find lots of books and essays on the subject. But a few requirements for libertarianism:
- LIMITED government (not non-existant)
- free markets
- personal responsibility
- individual freedoms
The main philosophy behind libertarianism is 'your rights go so far until they impede on other people's rights"
DO NOT spread misinformation like this; it is iresponsible, and ignorant!
Libertas in infinitum
These people are, for the most part, poor folks who had no means to escape town last Sunday when the warning went out. No car. No money to put themselves up in a motel outside of town. The rich white people got the hell out, leaving the poor behind to drown.
Look at the news reports. Most of the faces are black and poor. Instead of being able to escape this shitstorm, they had to resort to being crammed into the Superdome, enduring overflowing stinking toilets, stifling heat, and the goddamn roof ripping off during one of the worst hurricanes this country has ever seen. These people are tired, scared, recently homeless, and very desperate. I'm sure they'd rather be anyplace but the festering bowl of sewage that New Orleans has become in the last couple of days.
Don't you dare make the inference that all 50,000+ of these people are merely stubborn stalwarts or hooligans bent on raising a ruckus now that the rule of law has broken down. While I condemn the reported rapes and other assorted outbreaks of lawlessness (reports of which I'm sure are being overhyped as usual by a racist mainstream media), most of these people are just desperately poor people who are scared at the prospect of what will happen to them in the next 24-48 hours. Put your critical thinking cap on, buddy, it's not like everyone there has turned into a murderous rapist. If you believe that, you're as racist as those peddling that "information."
Disaster stockpiles don't seem to have been in place in New Orleans, even for the cheap stuff. A shipping container of water purification tablets would have been a huge help. Nobody seems to have thought to equip the Superdome, the designated disaster assembly point, with some basic water purification gear.
Congress and the voters need to ask some hard questions about where all that money goes and whether it's being spent properly.
Hate to push you off of your high horse, but how exactly are we to show compassion towards someone committing rape?
Of course you don't show compassion toward that person, considered in isolation.
And yet I have been reading many characterizations of this hurricane's victims as being all looters and rapists, who deserve no sympathy and who should be fired on from helicopters. As if everyone in the city had all gathered in the Superdome and voted for the raping to begin.
Some percentage of the population can't behave themselves even when there is rule of law. Eventually they end up in jail.
An additional percentage of the population will behave, because they don't want to go to jail. When anarchy breaks out, the rule of law is gone, and the cops have no gasoline, bullets, or effective authority, these are the people who run around raping and looting and causing trouble. If they were members of the first group they'd be in jail and you wouldn't see them. When the cops are able to do their jobs, they behave. You meet some of them every day and don't realize it.
Don't be tempted to characterize the entire population by the actions of this group when order breaks down. The media isn't helping, and is conflating them with the "good people" who lift items like toothpaste and bottled water, if they can justify taking it enough to satisfy their consciences. From a helicopter they all look the same.
But the latent troublemakers are just reflecting a facet of human nature- these people exist in all cultures. We saw the same thing happen in Baghdad two years ago, remember? Do you recall the puzzlement? Everyone wondering why are the Iraqis destroying their own country? Not all of them were- the ones that did were the ones that we noticed. Entire populations don't just all just get together and decide to misbehave. You, as an observer, need to be mindful of your own tendency to generalize. Especially now.
The problem with FEMA preparedness and intervention goes a bit higher up.
http://www.nola.com/hurricane/katrina/pdf/083105/a 5.pdf
More likely, a lot of both. What ppl seem to be forgetting here, is that NO police department about 5 years ago, was considered the most corrupt in the nation. In fact, during a federal probe of the city, they had to call an early end to it, because they had to stop a murder. Apparently the chief of police (or possibly an assistant chief) had ordered a hit on somebody for not paying up.
That does not mean that all are corrupt there. But no doubt there are a lot that are.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.