I am a refugee from New Orleans, safe with my family in Nashville, Tennessee. As near as I can tell, we have suffered only minimal property damage due to the Hurricane Katrina. I have been blogging the hurricane at the sites mentioned in a previous posts. Online communicators have helped provide the minutia of block-by-block reporting, ferrying information from those who rode it out to those who evacuated. We are ferrying messages of dire emergencies and we are getting aid for people who need it. If you can bear the heartbreak, you can follow some of these threads at the news blogs shown previously.

Everyone is asking, "What can we do to help?" New Orleans needs two things right now: WATER and POLICE. If you are employed by a beverage manufacturer or bottler or distributor, you should lead with your brand *immediately* and get water airlifted to the overpasses of New Orleans no matter what it takes. If you are a CEO of Coke or Pepsi or Budweiser -- or you know someone who knows the CEO -- please get the corporate jet fired up and drop pallets of bottled water onto New Orleans. Without this water NOW thousands will die. I realize this is asking for something beyond reason, but if you are in PR with a beverage company I implore you to insist on immediately transporting water to New Orleans by whatever means necessary.

Houston has agreed to house our refugees. Dallas has agreed to educate our children. San Antonio has opened its gates and hearts to 25,000 displaced. Your city, your state, needs to step up, too. If you are in government relations, help your largest employers to coordinate giving. These people will need clothes (JC Penney, Levi-Strauss, Nordstrom?), they will need automobiles (Avis, Enterprise, Ford, Toyota?), they will need gasoline (many of the dead in Mississippi and New Orleans could not afford to buy gas to get out because the hurricane hit at the end of the month). Prepaid cards are wonderful aid for individuals; donations to the Red Cross are wonderful in aid for all of us; and finding a way to get water into New Orleans NOW would be the most marvelous, life-saving gift of all.

From Nashville, Tennessee,
STEVE O'KEEFE
Vice President, IAOC
New Orleans Refugee