I'M STILL HAVING TROUBLE GETTING MY HEAD AROUND KATRINA--how do you reconcile catastrophe? And as I continue my love/hate relationship with the media--I feel compelled to stay abreast of the coverage but have come to dislike much of what I see and how it's presented--I find myself feeling a similar news fatigue that I felt following 9/11 and the start of the war in Iraq.
Much of this fatigue involves a temporal uncertainty: Not being certain if what I'm seeing is current; hearing much of the same arguments and items repeated endlessly. There is much news out there, though. As my USATODAY headlined last wee: This story doesn't have legs, it has tentacles. The Wall Street Journal Online has done a nice job of aggregating it in their new "Crisis News Tracker." I'm not certain if its part of WSJ.com's subscription service (I pay for WSJ.com and do so gladly; the content is excellent), but follow the link and find out.
The Tracker borrows heavily on the blog format, ordering news items temporally from most to least recent, and including hyperlinks where relevant. Here's a snippet from today's entries:
6:00 p.m.: Search and rescue crews on the
Mississippi coast keep looking for victims, but as the state's death
toll topped 200 on the 10th day after the storm, the focus has shifted
from saving lives to recovering bodies. Despite mounting health
concerns, many residents have expressed frustration that they haven't
had access to their homes yet. The National Guard has stopped some
people as they tried to return to look for personal possessions.
5:50 p.m.: Northwest Airlines said it will indefinitely suspend its daily nonstop flight from New York to Tokyo due to the record-high cost of jet fuel.
5:40 p.m.: The evacuation of New Orleans
continues, as the city says the combination of fetid water, fires and
natural gas leaks have made it too dangerous to stay. "A large group of
young armed men armed with M-16s just arrived at my door and told me
that I have to leave," Patrick McCarty, who owns several buildings and
lives in one of them in the city's Lower Garden District, told the AP.
"While not saying they would arrest you, the inference is clear." A
frail-looking Anthony Charbonnet, 86, grumbled as he locked his front
door and walked slowly backward down the steps of the house where he
had lived since 1955. "I haven't left my house in my life,'' he said as
soldiers took him to a helicopter. "I don't want to leave."
4:05 p.m.: On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrials finish the session up 44 points.
4:03 p.m.: WSJ's updated photo gallery
includes photo of Royce Davis, who has set up a make-shift home on the
beach in East Biloxi, Miss. Davis, who worked at a nearby casino, is
now homeless and unemployed.
4:00 p.m.: Ken Wells reports from Madisonville, La.
This is a story of a heroic unrescue. Clancy DuBos, a gangly,
loquacious New Orleanian in a hunter-orange ball cap, t-shirt and baggy
shorts, has assembled a flotilla of four fishing boats and gathered his
15 or so volunteers around him on a dock at a marina here, where the
stagnating flood waters of Hurricane Katrina have turned the Tchefuncte
River into a chocolate brown gumbo of stench. A brisk breeze, which
would normally be welcomed on mornings as sunny and sultry as this,
sends the river odor whirling through the air, where none can escape
it. Read Ken's full report.
3:55 p.m.: The Wall Street Journal's Russell Gold reports. British oil giant BP
said 175,000 barrels of daily oil production from platforms it operates
in the Gulf of Mexico will remain shut down due to problems with the
pipelines and infrastructure needed to move it ashore. This is about
12% of the gulf's daily oil output. Earlier, crude prices widened their
losses almost $2 to near $64 a barrel, as the government lowered its
demand forecast and the oil-and-gas industry reported progress in their
recovery efforts.
2:20 p.m.: FEMA chief Michael Brown
announces plan to distribute $2,000 debit cards to hurricane victims.
"The concept is to get them some cash in hand to empower them to make
decisions about what they need to start rebuilding their lives," he
says. A reporter asks if Brown plans to resign, an idea pushed by Nancy
Pelosi (D., Calif.). "The president's in charge of that, not me. I
serve totally at the will of the president."