The eye of Hurricane Katrina passed right over my little town.  All day long, I kept waiting for the helicopters to fly over St. Tammany Parish and show us what was left of Slidell.  Nothing.  The next morning, the same thing.  By 11:00, I was going out of my mind.  All we had heard was from the mayor of New Orleans:  the Twin Spans (going across the lake to N.O.) were destroyed and all of Slidell was under water.  So, we started the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog to make the information come to us and to make all damage information on Slidell easily available. 

So many rumors were flying around, that I wanted a way to validate what had happened.  24 hours after the storm, and still no good information.

Within ten minutes of my first posts, friends started to call.  Some were in Atlanta, others in Houston, Tulsa, etc.  They had heard things.  When enough data points piled up, I’d make a post.  CNN emailed within 45 minutes of the first post:  what do you know? David Parmet spread the word to key media & blog outlets.  Friends old and new pointed to the site. 

Very quickly, I started to know quite a bit.  Comments, calls & emails quickly overwhelmed the workflow.  (Aside:  do you realize how hard it is to purge phrases like ‘flooded’, ‘swamped’, ‘covered up’, ‘blown away’, ‘eye of the storm’, etc. from your everyday chatter?  As I read John Battelle’s new book the other night, I winced at an extended passage he had about a Google algorithm redo code-named ‘Florida’.  His entire hurricane metaphor was innocent (and inherited from those following the changes) but, wow.  I’ve been immersed in the real fallout from a hurricane for the past week, and the words have become sort of grotesque.)

So much to tell, and I’ll try to annotate this post as more comes back.  Anecdotes:  we helped many people actually see and/or hear from their loved ones for the very first time after the storm.  One woman watched a CNN video we linked to and saw her father for the first time in days.  She subsequently appeared on CNN to tell her story about seeing her father via the blog post.  Another email I got deep in the middle of one night explained that everyone in this guy’s family thought an uncle was dead until they saw a photo of him on the blog.  He called them all up at 1:30 to wake them with the good news.  Someone posted that two older ladies (Louise Webb and her sister) were on North Boulevard and needed ice and supplies.  My Dad was driving by the next morning, I knew, going to his office, so he became (in Britt Blaser’s parlance) an open resource.  He took them ice and more goodies.  Groceries brought in from Mobile the next day.  "I really miss my coffee," said Louise.  So he brought her coffee the following morning.  Small good things in a time like this.

We were able to post eyewitness accounts, amateur photos, direct official information provided to us by the Sheriff’s Dept.  As Doc Searls noted, for that week, the Slidell Hurricane Blog was our town’s de facto newspaper.  Written by all of us.  We experimented with an email to post feature to allow folks to directly post their own reports. 

An unintended consequence:  the blog posts became the virtual lightposts people used to tack up ‘missing’ notices, a la 911.  We had thousands.  I was concerned that all those requests were getting buried in the comments, hidden away and ineffective.  I put out an SOS to the social Web.  Hugh MacLeod set up a wiki.  Ross Mayfield wrote in to also offer a hosted wiki.  I was hesitant about how effective this would be, as I already had heard from folks at home that the ‘blog’ term was confusing to them as well.  Surprisingly, the wiki collected quite a few postings.  We also set up another site with a simple form allowing people to post their own searches in a way that was simpler to link to, index, etc.  Britt Blaser got going on a huge project to apply his Web infrastructure work to Katrina relief. 

We’ve had over 85,000 readers since that Tuesday after the storm.  Posted more than 350 entries with hyperlocal information about damage, safety info, relief efforts, etc.  Had thousands of reader comments.  Links from blogs all over.  Print & broadcast media coverage. 

So what did we learn?  (Note: these are our initial thoughts after all the hurley burley.  Please add your own observations.)

• Information is a necessity.  Speed matters.  As the sign says, neighbors need info as well as the other supplies.

• Make it simple.  Then simpler still.  Unlike Weblogs Work visitors, we were trying to provide info to folks with very little blog experience.  The IE crowd.  The word blog put them off.  They didn’t know how to comment, etc.  We have no time for learning curves in such situations.
• Be ready for complexity.  The butterfly wing effect in full effect.  So much more is broken than our houses.  The disaster response, including that which is swarmed on by the Web, has to keep going deep.  Business continuation issues.  Psychological impacts.  I really don’t know what will happen to our town, but I know our recovery efforts are going to have to keep changing as the needs change.
• Check your politics.  We need all allies, all hands on deck.  Even as the news & blog postings around the storm started to take on a political charge, I very consciously avoided that for the Slidell blog.  I wanted all readers, all info sources, the full network.  There will be plenty of time later for meta discussions.
• The problem you think is the problem might not be the problem.  I didn’t intend on the site becoming a clearinghouse for missing persons.  Open systems let folks use the resources to solve their own problems.  We need to be pliable in how we design these things.
• Cast your net wide.  As I said, I tapped everyone I knew.  Fred Wilson in NYC helped flow traffic and technical help my way.  David Parmet got us visibility.  Paying attention to the right Technorati tags helped us grab all the interest in Slidell during those days. 
  It’s crazy the connections that lead back.  My best & earliest on-the-ground informant, Derek Babcock, came to me when his uncle in Miami read the blog and let me know he was there.  My friend Alex Muse posted about Slidell and what people could do to help on three different blogs and commented on Mark Cuban’s blog, raising well over $100,000 in donations from across the country.  A high school friend in Denmark emailed updates about her parents’ house. Others have written to me to donate money specifically for Slidell help, and we’re setting up a fund for that.  We have no idea where the connections will lead us, so cast the bread on the waters and see what happens. 
• Rumors are rampant.  I worked hard to ferret out rumors, and yet still propagated a few.  The water tower had fallen.  Florida Avenue Elementary was destroyed, etc.  I never did publish all the gruesome body count rumors I heard.  There is a whole study to be done on the spread of disaster rumors.  We’ll do that in another post.  

I’m sure more will come to me, but I wanted to put these thoughts out in prep for the Recovery 2.0 meeting tonight.  I’d also encourage you to read Ethan Zuckerman’s thoughts on what they learned from doing the Katrina PeopleFinder project.

See you tonight.  Look forward to the discussion.