Like several other people who've posted about it, I was queasily horrified by the National Weather Service's grim, graphic report on Hurricane Katrina, with its dire predictions ("most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer… all gabled roofs will fail, leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed… all windows will blow out… persons, pets, and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death… power outages will last for weeks… water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards…") which sounded more like an excerpt from a Drudge Report story than an official government bulletin.

nihilistic_kid posted the text of that bulletin when it first appeared, and linked to the Weather Service source page. I checked the link and read the same text. One of his readers apparently even called the National Weather Service to confirm that that was their press release and they hadn't been hacked or spoofed, which they confirmed. Still, checking the exact same link again, it appears that that press release has been taken down and replaced by a far more generic report.

Meanwhile, hoodcity has created something a lot of people will want to look into. The new "LJ user" katrinacane is an aggregate account which he's used to Friend everyone he can find who's living in New Orleans and choosing not to evacuate. If you go to that journal and click on "Friends," you'll be reading the journals of a bunch of people reporting in their LJs from Ground Zero of Hurricane Katrina. Here's hoping they all come through it all right, though I expect as the power goes out, they'll stop posting and scare the crap out of all their new readers. Meanwhile, it's deeply shocking to me how many of them are casually posting about how they might die, but they ain't movin' anyway, for whatever reason. (Like, for instance, because their cats aren't freaking out.)

I'm-a feelin': worried