Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts

Tens of thousands of blogs across the country are uniting today in an effort to promote relief efforts for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. The anchor post for this effort is here at Instapundit.

If you can, please donate something to either the Salvation Army (Keep trying, as their servers are being overwhelmed right now. Yay!) or the American Red Cross.

Locally in Memphis, you can donate to WPTY ABC/24's relief effort or to any of the ad hoc Tennessee Freecycle efforts.

There is also a government-coordinated response, via the Shelby County Emergency Management Agency. You can register as a volunteer through Volunteer Memphis.

If you know of any Memphis, West Tennessee or Mid-South private, civic, work- or church-based or other organisation's relief project, please feel free to list them in comments. Give a URL, or physical address, or a contact name and phone number, along with the group's name, so folks can get in touch with them. Spread the word so that people who want to do something will have lots of options for helping.

If you are a blogger, or have a website, please consider posting something like this to your own blog or site to help get the news and connections out there. This is precisely what we on the Internet excel at; let's use our expertise!

And if, like me, you have a pet and want to do something for the uncountable numbers of family pets that are in distress or have been abandoned or lost, you can go to Noah's Wish, a national animal relief group, to help their efforts. More on them here.

It's taking time, because of the breadth and scale of the disaster, to understand just what level of catastrophe has been wrought. Estimated death tolls now are beginning to creep into the thousands. Thousands. We'll never know for sure because so many will simply become "missing" and be lost to us forever. Don't let more fall away in the recovery effort.

Please, if you can, donate or contribute in some way, no matter how small. It's needed.