The situation looks pretty grim from here, what with looting (some of it by cops and firefighters), a children's hospital under seige, and a hostage situation. The feds are doing what they can, but we can help out too.
Instapundit has a useful charity round-up. It is worth noting that the anniversary of the Beslan Massacre is coming up and that while we could only react to that tragedy, here we be more pro-active and I would urge all readers to donate to the victims.
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.
Please note that the city of New Orleans has declared this a day of prayer. Good idea, that.
Old Marcus Vitruvius, as his nom de guerre would indicate, is an engineer through and through. I distract myself from the human calamity and worries about my friends (all safe) and friends of friends and family of friends (not known to be all safe) by concentrating on the infrastructure damage in the region.
And by the few good reports I'm getting, that damage is severe, and could be profound, up and down the Gulf Coast.
Does anyone know of a good, emerging resource of damage assessment and reconstruction plans? I could take a crack at paraphrasing some of what I've read, but I have absolutely no depth of expertise in the ways of the Mississippi River and Gulf Coast import/export system.