katrina

This week: charity in a connected world. The January 12 earthquake and humanitarian disaster in Haiti had an important technological component: Through the text message giving program, the Red Cross raised $26 million in funds in just nine days. That's not just a large amount of money to be raised in a short time, it's an unprecedented level of participation. Was this a one-time outpouring of goodwill, or the beginning of a trend in global humanitarianism made possible by technology?

To talk about this and related issues on the Roundtable, I'm joined by Caroline McCarthy from our New York office. Caroline has been covering the online giving program for CNET. And from the Red Cross itself, we have Jonathan Aiken, director of media relations. Before joining the Red Cross, Aiken was a Washington correspondent and an anchor for CNN.

PALM DESERT, Calif.--If a major earthquake hits San Francisco, where CBS Interactive (CNET News' parent) is based, how would everyone in the company communicate with each other in the aftermath?

If the folks at Transformyx, a Baton Rouge, La., company, have anything to say about it, we'd all be using their technology, an online service called RallyPoint.

The idea behind the service is to make it possible for everyone in an organization to stay in touch with each other and to get all the relevant information they need after any kind of significant disaster strikes, be it an … Read more

Good: You're in an up-and-coming band. Bad: Hurricane Katrina comes along and destroys all your gear. Good: A charity, Music Rising, is set up to try to raise money. They're doing this by auctioning off iPods that music celebs like Gwen Stefani, Faith Hill, and The Britney have loaded with their favorite playlists. Sounds like a win for everyone involved, but it might be too good to be true.

Don't get me wrong, as a former musician and survivor of my own environmental catastrophes (no, not my messy bachelor pad), I understand the need for relief. I … Read more

With Hurricane Gustav headed straight toward New Orleans, emergency officials and telecommunication companies are preparing for the worst.

Gustav's winds had reached 150mph as of midday Saturday, making it a dangerous Category 4 hurricane, according to the National Hurricane Center. The NHC predicted that Gustav could reach Category 5--the highest level possible.

Gustav is pounding Cuba right now. It is expected to reach the Gulf Coast on Monday afternoon.

On Saturday, the NHC began trying out Gustav updates via podcast. The NHC is also making a PDA/smartphone-friendly version of its site available.

According to the Associated Press, the … Read more

NEW ORLEANS--When I wrote Wednesday that large parts of this city are still severely damaged from Hurricane Katrina and, in some cases, potentially beyond recovery, I didn't want to leave the impression that nothing is being done to protect against the next big hurricane.

In fact, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is putting large sums of money and significant effort into helping to reduce the risk that a future storm of Katrina's magnitude will inundate New Orleans.

All told, the Corps of Engineers here are working to fix and/or replace 220 miles of levees and … Read more

In 2005, MIT professor Kerry Emanuel wrote a research paper that described historical links between climate change and an increasing intensity of hurricanes.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit.

A new study out of MIT further strengthens the connection between climate change and the intensity and duration of hurricanes, although many unanswered questions remain.

The study, by postdoctoral fellow Ragoth Sundararajan and graduate student John Williams, uses a new technique that adds finer detail to computer simulations of global weather patterns. Emanuel's original study analyzed records of tropical cyclones--commonly called hurricanes or typhoons--from the middle of the 20th century … Read more

Until a few months after Hurricane Katrina flattened it, the little Mississippi hamlet of Pearlington had never been graced with a nice, big welcome sign.

But that was before, as Pearlington was being completely ignored by every official relief agency in the Gulf region, a bunch of strangers, all of them Burning Man attendees who had formed a group called Burners without Borders, suddenly descended to help.

This was no ragtag group of 10 or 20 hopeless do-gooders showing up without a plan. This was more than 150 people, toting heavy equipment, supplies of food and water, years of experience … Read more

Ice storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis are just some of the forces of nature that can wreak havoc on the lives of untold thousands in a period of seconds, minutes, days, or months. As global temperatures rise and as a growing human population expands into more and more areas less and less suited for either habitation or rescue, the average person in the world (one of 6+ billion) faces an increasing likelyhood that he or she will face a real disaster that seriously disrupts possible response.

Consider the plight of Sri Lanka, which was devastated by a tsunami in 2004. According to a BBC eyewitness reporter:

There are no kind of emergency services here, there are no helicopters thumping through the sky to come to save people. It is a do-it-yourself rescue.

The final tally reported more than 40,000 dead and a staggering 2.5 million displaced. And from the report's summary: "Waves as high as six meters had crashed into coastal villages, sweeping away people, cars, and even a train with 1,700 passengers." Whatever infrastructure may have existed prior to the tsunami, it was completely overwhelmed by both the magnitude of human need and the destructive power of the disaster. Within hours, open-source software developers created the Sahana project, and within days, their home-grown solution was doing more to help the Sri Lankan people than first-world conventional software packages did in far less extreme circumstances. And now it is doing even more, with the One Laptop Per Child hardware platform.… Read more