Ho John Lee’s Weblog

Here’s the Bay Area Red Cross donation page for Hurricane Katrina relief funds. You might find it’s not responding, I tried it unsuccessfully several times today, finally got all the way through the process a little while ago. Hopefully that’s a sign that many other people are trying to donate online.

New Orleans is one of those places I always wanted to visit sometime but hadn’t gotten to yet. Looks like I won’t have that chance, at least not the way it was. The images and stories from the past couple of days look like outtakes from Escape From New York meets the Poseidon Adventure. Aside from the acres of flooded and shredded buildings, I find it astonishing that basic law and order has collapsed to the extent and duration that it has.

Terry Ebbert said looters have been breaking into stores all over town to steal guns. The Times-Picayune newspaper reported that the gun section at a new Wal-Mart was cleaned out. And the thieves are apparently using their new guns, with shots heard through the night.

There’s a wonderful human impulse to want to pitch in, to do something to make it better. There have been some posts on the web by techies offering to fly out and help. However, for most people, especially anyone reading about Katerina online, the best thing they can do for now is to send cash donations.

Not equipment, not supplies, and not themselves.

Donate online, and the bits that represent your goodwill will zip across instantly, turning into funds for supplies and help on the ground out there, right now, rather than the atoms of physical stuff somewhere else, arriving in a few days, that will need to be shipped and inventoried, creating overhead and taking precious time. If you go out there in person, and if you haven’t been called already, you’re probably going to be in the way.

In addition to the Red Cross, here some other choices:

Here’s FEMA’s list of disaster relief organizations.

“Cash donations are especially helpful to victims,” Brown said. “They allow volunteer agencies to issue cash vouchers to victims so they can meet their needs. Cash donations also allow agencies to avoid the labor-intensive need to store, sort, pack and distribute donated goods. Donated money prevents, too, the prohibitive cost of air or sea transportation that donated goods require.”

Here’s Glenn Reynold’s extensive list of organizations accepting donations.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 31st, 2005 at 9:58 pm and is filed under General, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.