September 26, 2005 | The Other World

SSN pal, Andy Sullivan, a damn fine technology policy reporter for Reuters, has been in New Orleans for the last 10 days.

He's filed a bunch of stories and he's also talking to the blog.

New Orleans has flooded again, but you already know that. I spent the day driving around with Jessica Rinaldi trying to get a handle of the scope of the problem -- while everybody knew about the overtopping of the Industrial Canal on the Lower Ninth Ward Side, the other side of the canal proved vulnerable as well and neighborhoods flooded for miles.

So it was a day of Mad Max driving and sending in updates via text message when the voice link crapped out. This picture shows me doing the wire service equivalent of those grainy stand-up shots you see on CNN, where the correspondent reports over a low-bandwidth video link: OMG!! New Orleans floods!!! WTF?!?!?

All my good-driving habits painfully cultivated over the past few years with Meg went straight out the window. Barrrelling through intersections, driving the wrong way down one-way streets, hopping curbs and inching through puddles that turn into lakes while we're halfway through. This SUV, a Chevy Trailblazer, is really earning its keep, except it keeps reminding me to keep my seatbelt on. It's going to be a painful adjustment back to civilization.

[...]

Some highlights from the day:

- We stumbled on a convoy of dump trucks trying to deliver rocks in a spot where water comes in. They're pulled over, arguing and gesticulating wildly. I tell them which roads are flooded and which are passable, and we convoy to the spot together. So journalists sometimes can be good citizens too.

- Jessica: "They need to build everything out of the material they use for those Virgin Mary statues, because those things are indestructible."

- I interview a local official, accompanied by a local journalist. As we wallk away, he says, "That guy's cool. I buy my pot from him." Only in New Orleans do reporters get their illegal drugs from government officials.

As I think I've said before, it's going to be tough to write about Internet stuff after this.

Go start on this page and follow the links to the stories from there.

Posted by Ryan Singel at September 26, 2005 10:20 AM

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