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Urban Legends and Katrina
January 18th, 2007An email is circulating that has the New Orleans bloggers fretting. Gina Lampard wrote:
There is some email (AGAIN) going around comparing the recent snow storms to Katrina, and blah blah blah . . . they were much better ‘behaved’ than those folks in the gulf regions for all these reasons. I detest this stuff! Here’s a link to a blog where my FRIEND rebutes some of the indiocy — but the pieces of the email are in her post - so maybe its something we can work from. This stuff grates me. GRRRR!
Greg Peters responsed that Snopes had covered this in Snow Comparison stamping it with the status false.
I don’t worry about these thing as much as the other bloggers. I’m afraid that the time spent researching and debunking email chains is not as effective as doing the sort of research that Levees.org, 1 Greater New Orleans, or CHAT have been doing.
Good to have Snopes around. One of the things that I’ve learned is that if a journalist calls, give them homework. Rather than try and debunk all this stuff ourselves, feed it to Snopes and feed them some a few head pointers. They’ll do the work. They’ll publish it with authority.
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Comments 
It gets tiresome having to deal with this kind of crap all the time. We can ask ourselves who believes this stuff anyway? Well there is obviously a market for it just go to the grocery store and look at the National Enquirer. But you do have to answer it before your friends call and ask about it. I guess the thing that bothers me the most is the hateful nature of it.
It is tiresome. That’s why I suggest that we delegate this stuff to Snopes, and focus on questions that only we can answer.
It was this that made me publish my SNOPES roundup of NOLA oriented myths back on Jan 7th:
http://humidcity.com/2007/01/07/snopes/
I think I will be adding a page to my blog with them and just keep it updated periodically.
There are not often new ones, just recycled fwds with new names and locations spilced in…