(An email from a friend of mine from New Orleans)

Dear Everyone:

Today's update will be shorter as I'm exhausted.

We moved from Starkville, MS to Atlanta yesterday. The drive was uneventful but it was really odd meeting many evacuees from New Orleans once we were so far away (if only geographically). In Mississippi, we met a man who had biked (using his wife's mountain) from the Cotton Mill Apartments in New Orleans' CBD to Baton Rouge on Wednesday. He says that there are still six families barricaded in the complex who thought it was too dangerous to leave. His wife picked him up in Baton Rouge and then had trouble getting gas to make it to Northern Mississippi. We met another person (a former resident of Chalmette who has lived in Alabama for 14 years) desperately trying to find a relative in Thibodaux. (Thibodaux is supposedly fine).