It's a gray, nondescript, what-the-hell-let's-have-some-Chinese-food sort of day in New York. This morning I peered through the aluminum plates of the West Side Highway pedestrian bridge and into the Ground Zero pit, where they're still hacking apart the remains of what used to be the sublevel flooring of a shopping mall. Rudely truncated girders wearing tutus of two-foot thick reinforced concrete cluster in the far northwest corner like giant industrial fungi.
That unfinished building in the upper left corner of the image is the replacement for Seven World Trade Center, just across from the patch of steel mushrooms. I was going to write, "the new Seven World Trade Center," but there isn't a World Trade Center anymore, and no new complex of buildings of which the new structure could be considered the seventh. I wonder what they'll end up calling it? We'll find out eventually, hopefully before 2012 when the Freedom Tower is completed.
On the other side of the world, the death toll climbs inexorably upwards. A few days after September 11, we spent some hours on the Lower West Side moving black Hefty bags stuffed with donated clothing from one place to another place, which was an essentially pointless activity, but we needed to do something, so that's what we did. So now, Amazon--where I did 90% of my Christmas shopping this year--became my vehicle for a donation to the American Red Cross. Less pointless, but one-click charity is so effortless. I won't feel it in my arms and back tomorrow.
So, I've also contacted a number of outdoor equipment suppliers to see if they would be willing to provide a wholesale price for Katadyn water filters. One filter can provide up to 13,000 gallons of water that's free of dysentery, typhoid fever, cholera, colibacillosis, amoebic and bacterial dysentery, bilharciosis, giardia and so forth. If I get a favorable response, I'll set up a transparent process for accepting donations and shipping filters off to where they're needed. Further information as I get it.
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Command Post has a list of everything donation-related here.
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I heard on the radio that among the ships the US is sending to Indonesia are three ships capable of producing 90,000 gallons of potable water a day. Mebbe they won't need my steenking water filters. We'll see.
