DailyHeights

Since there are so many New Orleans expats and aficionados in Brooklyn, here’s a few updates on the chaos that’s spreading through the city. Funny, people were almost celebrating last night that the city dodged a bullet…

The breach in the 17th Street canal levee (on the lakefront) is “football-field sized” and they are trying to sandbag it. In the meantime, all of downtown is filling up with water. No news on the airport that I’ve heard, but many of the roads out are now underwater since the levees broke. CNN is reporting that 80% of the city is “under water” now–that can’t be right, can it??

The report on CNN a few hours ago was that there are about 10,000 people stuck in the Superdome and the authorities won’t let them out yet, mainly because there’s nowhere for them to go, and many of the roads out are pretty much blocked. EMS personnel are delivering injured persons to the Superdome.

The tension in the Superdome is getting pretty extreme, and one guy just deliberately jumped to his death – he got up from a domino game, said “look out” and threw himself over a balcony.

Now, there are fires breaking out in several places. Refugees are flooding toward the Superdome right now, because the water is still rising. The area around the Superdome has gone from knee-deep to waist-deep and is expected to go even higher.

Finally, just saw footage of Canal Street looters – the stores are all being completely pillaged! People are stopping in the street to try on Nikes and make sure they get the best fit.

No word on Jacques-Imo’s and uptown in general, but downtown, I imagine the French Quarter is starting to fill up…

UPDATE: Jefferson Parish is under martial law. It’s going to be at least a month before anybody is allowed back in!


New Orleans Flooding: Discuss in the Message Boards

Oops. A bit dated now, but here it is. From the New York Times via Brownstoner.

PROSPECT HEIGHTS $750,000
34 Plaza Street
2-bedroom, 2-bath, 1,250-sq.-ft. co-op in postwar building; 24-hr. doormen; dining area, windowed kitchen, parquet floors, Manhattan skyline view; roof deck; maintenance $1,029, 30% tax deductible; listed at $695,000 (multiple bids), 3 weeks on market (broker: Warren Lewis Realty)

Discuss: Prospect Heights Message Boards

Last week’s “server overload” incident knocked Daily Heights off The Internets, and in an emergency session, we had to negotiate with our benevolent webhost to put us back on the air, please.

In response to these woes, DAILY HEIGHTS regular Carnivore inquired about donations. His “can I donate” post generated a flood of response. Within hours, we had more than $500 in donations come in through Paypal! I’m really struggling for a way to properly thank FLUTE, JamesOnVandy, Lucas, Stacey, Daniel, alafairnadia, Carnivore, 11238, Eugene from Prospect Park, and all the rest of you for your support.

The immediate crisis period is over, but you can still make donations at any time via paypal (at this address: [email protected]) or by check/cash/whatever. Clicking the “donate” link over to your right makes this process super easy.

So what about that server problem? The status of Daily Heights is a bit better than last week – we are still limping along on the same old server. We’ve crippled a few server functions so that the site won’t run so hot. It’s not clear whether we will stay or go, but inertia certainly consumes fewer man-hours of internetty frustration. Whatever happens, all of your donations WILL GO toward improving the site, paying for bandwidth/server space, supporting neighborhood events, etc.

Regards,

The Management

Comments here.

NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is doing a piece on Ratner and Atlantic Yards, so they ducked into Freddy’s–a hornet’s nest of anti-Ratner sentiment–to get the community perspective.

Brooklyn Papers just published an article about the PBS news crew coming to Freddy’s. Hey Jess, great article, but you got the reporter’s name wrong… it’s Ray Suarez, not Luis…

Read more…