Hurricane Ida came swiftly and decisively. I played a small part in helping some people I know there

Hurricane Ida came swiftly in the morning, slamming into Louisiana as a Category 4 hurricane. Terrebonne Parish and surrounding areas lost power early on; I didn't know if my friend had evacuated or not until sometime later in the day -- they'd moved to a town just outside of the storm's path.

After I'd confirmed that my friend was safe, I started tracking the storm and watching for updates from stormchasers who were livestreaming onto YouTube. Reed Timmer was the one I eventually settled on due to him being right in Houma, LA during when the storm eye hit. When his YouTube stream started dropping out, his Facebook one kept going so I quickly spun up a restream onto my YouTube channel to give people who didn't use Facebook a place to keep watching. During that time, I moderated the chat so as not to permit any politics/conspiracy junk and organized information exchanges between people to check on damage and flooding across various places.

I know a few relatives of my aforementioned friend. Even though mobile service sort-of remained, LTE data was hard to come by and I became the only link that they had to important information about conditions, flooding, and damage. I was pulling in info and sending it to them for most of the rest of the evening.