New Orleans Flood Victims

Matt came home from work this morning (he works nights) quite wound up. He couldn’t sleep for anything. After much frustration, he figured out what was bugging him…a million and a half homeless flood victims sitting around tent cities and in stadiums with little food and nowhere comfortable to sleep. And here we sit comfortably in our homes grateful it didn’t happen here.

Then the dilemma once he figured that out was what can he do about it? He stewed over that for hours and finally called our dear friend Paul with an idea. Paul had been stewing over the same thing and decided to do something about it. So here’s the scoop: www.homeflood.org. Help Flood Victims.

Matt came home from work this morning (he works nights) quite wound up. He couldn’t sleep for anything. After much frustration, he figured out what was bugging him…a million and a half homeless flood victims sitting around tent cities and in stadiums with little food and nowhere comfortable to sleep. And here we sit comfortably in our homes grateful it didn’t happen here.

Then the dilemma once he figured that out was what can he do about it? He stewed over that for hours and finally called our dear friend Paul with an idea. Paul had been stewing over the same thing and decided to do something about it. So here’s the scoop: www.homeflood.org. Help Flood Victims.

Matt has spent all day creating a site where people may offer housing or transportation to flood victims. There are three options: invite victims into your home to help them until they can get back on their feet, offer assistance transporting victims to homes (not working yet), and registering as a relief worker in order to peruse the database and determine if the victim with you is a suitable match for the family offering assistance.

We need your help, too. Paul sent out press releases, and is busy calling news stations to air the story. Getting the word out will help a lot. If people natonwide can see that in a little way, they can help someone, the victims can be well taken care of. We also want it to spread across the internet fast; New Orleans will take 9-10 weeks to pump out, and the sooner we can help, the better. If you have a blog or know someone with a blog, please link this article to your blog. Once www.homeflood.org is linked to about 25 blogs with the same text — “Help Flood Victims” — it’ll come up higher in the Google rankings and more people will be helped by Matt and Paul’s efforts. Please spread the word to all your friends and neighbors and tell them they can find a way to help.

(Just no chain letters about it. I hate chain letters! — matt)

Why not sit down with your family and decide what you can do to help? Every little bit counts.

3 thoughts on “New Orleans Flood Victims”

  1. Close enough in all but particulars

    Close enough for government work. I think we’ve abandoned any idea of taking donations, and instead referred them to the Red Cross.

    But coordinating rides cross-country and housing for displaced families with nowhere to go? THAT we can do. Putting our lists of do-gooders in the hands of relief workers struggling to find places to put the displaced? We can do that.

    http://www.homeflood.org/ .

    Now I’ve been up for over 24 hours because of this thing that wouldn’t let me go. Time to sleep, I think.

    —
    Matthew P. Barnson

  2. Best article yet…

    Here’s the best article I’ve found yet discussing why this turned into an environmental catastrophe:

    http://www.unknowncountry.com/journal/print.phtml?id=192

    The long and short of it: we did this to ourselves. At the initiative of the Bush administration, congress has been steadily eating the Army Corp of Engineer’s $70Mil budget for levee maintenance and improvement in New Orleans down to nothing since 2001. Since last year, the $70Mil which was supposed to be spent per year was reduced to just $500,000 and farmed off to a small private maintenance company.

    We can all see how well that idea went.

    —
    Matthew P. Barnson

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