Some 60 hours ago I joined the fray, working together with a rag-tag, barely organised group of people intent on providing help as disaster loomed (no offense intended). I jumped in and did what I thought I could do, organising and cleaning up the templates, editing HTML, adding info as I could. Others did the same, handling things they're good at and working together toward a common goal. The result was a series of Mothership and child diaries which provided information for those affected by Hurricane Gustav. The Mother & Child method is necessary to both defeat a technical system designed to drop a story within a day or so and a desire not to "pollute" the diary list.
Did we help? Dunno. Can't say, at least not until we hear from people who were there over the coming weeks. I'd like to think we did and can't honestly belive we didn't help at least a couple of folks out there. And just as we wrap up Gustav, Hurricane Hanna is on it's way toward the East Coast.
We need basic information and just a few minutes of your time can make this whole exercise a lot easier. Follow me below the fold for ways to help a lot of people now and in the future with minimal effort.
It's easy. Take a look at the Hurricane Gustav Mothership and child diaries. See all those grey boxes with information like Emergency Phone Numbers, News Links, Hotlines, Radio and TV, Disaster Coordination and other such gems? Well, I need that sort of stuff for a whole lotta states. The changing stuff? Fuck it! We'll do it live. We can update evacuation schedules and predictions on the fly but this other stuff, that can be done in advance. To reduce the duplication, please post such information in comments in this diary. Such comments are guar-an-TEED to get 1-8 recs just from the Liveblog crew.
No one is sure where Hanna will land but at the time of writing there's an 80% chance it will remain a hurricane and make landfall in the U.S. somewhere between Florida and the Carolinas. Right now it's hitting the Bahamas and the people down there aren't really enjoying themselves.
Please take just a few minutes to look up any of this basic information for the following states: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina (including the coastal islands) and Virginia. Information for other disaster-prone states would be helpful for future reference (yes, I'm making templates and storing the info) but these are the states most likely to be affected at the end of the week. I want to code modules with basic state information for all sorts of disasters, from hurricanes and flooding to wildfires, earthquakes and tornadoes. Anything which can help.
So why is a guy who calls himself "really evil", who collects the occasional donut and who lives in Germany -- thousands of miles from the nearest hurricane -- so intent on liveblogging disasters? Well, someone's gotta do it. The buck stops here. I think Dawkins' explanations of altruism in The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion explain it most elegantly. I'm just another human and hope that, if I were facing peril (great, great peril!) that someone else would do the same for me or my loved ones. There's also this, written in a bit too much haste.
And so I expect to kill this weekend not out in some beergarden enjoying some tasty Munich beer in these last couple weeks before some six million shitbag tourists descend on this city like locusts and make my daily office commute a true living hell, but rather sitting in my apartment in the old city handling the "overnight" shift until one of the people on the East Coast wakes up. After the hand-off, hell yeah I'm off for beer! Shoot me a message if you're planning to be here for the 'Fest. But for the love of all that does not suck, please get me some of this information so that we can be ready to roll long before landfall.
Edit: I do not profess to write on behalf of any of the other livebloggers. They may feel differently about any and every idea I have and every position I take. I write only for and as myself, tiptoeing since I'm the n00b of the group.
woof.