Also, the company has put in place service and billing practices to help ease the burden on customers affected by the hurricane. For example, Cingular will not terminate service, has suspended collection activities, and is making accessories available at 50 percent off in the affected areas.
– For Cingular subscribers in New Orleans and Biloxi, Miss., there will be no text messaging, roaming, long distance, or overage charges for the month of September, and customers’ regular monthly charges will be reduced by 50 percent during that time.
– For customers in the Mobile, Ala.; Baton Rouge, La.; Lafayette, La; and Jackson, Miss. markets, monthly fees will be reduced by 25 percent for September, and on a case-by-case basis, there will be discounts on roaming and text messaging.
– For prepaid customers in the affected areas, Cingular will extend the expiration date on current minutes to October 31, 2005, will replace any minutes that expired since August 29, 2005, and will not charge for text messaging from August 29, 2005 through September 30, 2005.
via the cingular site
thanks daniel
sprint has announced this month will be free for all subscribers from the katrina ravaged areas!!
via Sprint Nextel site
The Red Cross debit card — worth between $350 and $2,000 — is available
to those who qualify, but the requirements for qualification were not clear.
Those cards will be activated about 12 hours after they’re approved.
The FEMA debit card will not be available for a few more days, according
to FEMA representative Ed Conley.
He said the agency hopes to avoid confusion and long lines before they
are ready to hand them out, and said people can register for the cards online.
thanks rachel!
i don’t understand how all of these people i know are able to pick up and start over so fast… i don’t see how anyone can just jump into school, job house etc within a week of being demoted to refugee status from full time job, health insurance, house, and two cars…
i don’t know… i know my wife and i are on the ball and have plans but we seem to be moving so slow compared to others we know who already have jobs, housing and more… plus i kind of feel bad taking red cross money, i have a family who is helping me and there are those so much worse off than me… of course i’m homeless and mostly jobless so i guess i just need to bite the bullet and head down to stand in line like the rest of my fellow evacuees/refugees…
via the official jefferson parish website:
09/04/05, 4:30 p.m. – Effective at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, September 8, 2005, only emergency vehicles will be allowed to travel the streets of Jefferson Parish, day or night. The Parish will be in lock-down mode, meaning that any citizens who have remained in the Parish after 6:00 p.m. on Thursday cannot drive on the streets of the Parish.
—-
this is good and bad… it will be harder for people to loot our place, but we will not be allowed to get home until jeff parish says come in…
first off… we found that photo right before borders closed and i had to hurry the post… the pic seems to show no water in our house… but the nyt this weekend has a graphic showing water in the apartment at least during the begining of the week… we think the water has since drained… but the state of the greater new orleans area is not yet safe enough for me or my wife to feel confortable returning or even allowing only me and maybe some family with a truck to return… i am thinking of flying to houston and renting or borrowing a truck in a week or so and driving home to check out the place and take all of our stuff that is salvagable… we think our couches are toast… our china closet is gone and hopefully didn’t fall down (maybe the china can be saved)… the clothing should be savable but will need to be washed… the humidity may have destroyed our bed (but we wanted a new one anyway)… hopefully the large boxes of old schleifstein and old devaney photos will be savable (the y are upstairs so we are crossing our fingers)… my art portfolio may have made it, but again the humidity could have destroyed all the art i have ever done (excepting the online stuff and the computer stuff)… i want our ketubah to make it since that is our official jewish wedding certificate… plus we need to grab the wife’s computer since almost all of her english papers are in it (harddrives can be cleaned and saved, no matter the water damage, i hope) and those papers will get her into grad school… can’t think of anything else right now (other than some personal momentos of the wife’s)…
of course we have been extremely lucky… if we can salvage anything this will be better than many in the city who have lost all to the waters and better than those whose lives were lost… if you want to help out the evacuees donate your time and money to reputable charitable organization including the Jewish Family Service, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross and the United Way.
