In the first few days after Katrina, survivor stories started showing up online. NOLA.com, the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, was an especially good source for eyewitness accounts of the flooding and the evacuation but others popped up at various blogs all over the place. I started to worry that some of the stories would be lost in cyberspace if they weren’t collected in one place as soon as possible. Thomas Nephew, who writes the Newsrack Blog, had the same idea so we put together a blog called Recording Katrina. It’s a sort of nicely decorated and organized link dump for survivors’ stories.

We’re also cataloging some of the best non-tradtitional reporting from the Gulf. It’s become clear that Team BushCo will be authorizing any steps it can get away with to stop enterprising members of the corporate media from doing their jobs. Some of those reporters, like Brian Williams, will give up and go home. Some of them will do what they can to get the story out. An example of the latter kind of journalism is this story from the SFGate. Staff writer Cecilia M. Vega illustrates the resistance that media of all kinds are fighting as they try to cover the biggest natural disaster in United States history: (emph mine)

A long caravan of white vans led by an Army humvee rolled Monday through New Orleans’ Bywater district, a poor, mostly black neighborhood, northeast of the French Quarter.

Recovery team members wearing white protective suits and black boots stopped at houses with spray painted markings on the doors designating there were dead bodies inside.

Outside one house on Kentucky Street, a member of the Army 82nd Airborne Division summoned a reporter and photographer standing nearby and told them that if they took pictures or wrote a story about the body recovery process, he would take away their press credentials and kick them out of the state.

“No photos. No stories,” said the man, wearing camouflage fatigues and a red beret.

On Saturday, after being challenged in court by CNN, the Bush administration agreed not to prevent the news media from following the effort to recover the bodies of Hurricane Katrina victims.

But on Monday, in the Bywater district, that assurance wasn’t being followed. The 82nd Airborne soldier told reporters the Army had a policy that requires media to be 300 meters — more than three football fields in length — away from the scene of body recoveries in New Orleans. If reporters wrote stories or took pictures of body recoveries, they would be reported and face consequences, he said, including a loss of access for up-close coverage of certain military operations.

Faced with being prevented from doing her job, Ms. Vega doesn’t give up, but instead reports what she witnesses. What she captured turns out to be more damning than any number of bodybags ever could:

Dean Nugent, of the Louisiana State Coroner’s Department, who accompanied the soldier, added that it wasn’t safe to be in Bywater. “They’ll kill you out here,” he said, referring to the few residents who have continued to defy mandatory evacuation orders and remain in their homes.”

“The cockroaches come out at night,” he said of the residents. “This is one of the worst places in the country. You should not be here. Especially you,” he told a female reporter.

Nugent, who is white, acknowledged he wasn’t personally familiar with the poor, black neighborhood, saying he only knew of it by reputation.

…

After the recovery team took away the St. Anthony Street body, two workers urinated on the side of a neighbor’s house.

The CNN suit was in response to comments Friday at a news conference in which officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency said members of the news media would not be allowed to witness the recovery of hurricane victims’ bodies.

Terry Ebbert, New Orleans’ homeland security director, had said Friday that the recovery effort would be done with dignity, “meaning that there would be no press allowed.” Army Lt. Gen. Russell Honore later said there would be zero access to the recovery operation.

During a hearing Saturday morning in U.S. District Court in Houston, a lawyer who represented the government said FEMA had revised its previous plans to limit coverage.

Government agencies may still refuse requests from members of the media to ride along, or be “embedded,” on recovery boats as crews gather the dead. “But, to the extent the press can go out to the locations, they’re free to do that,” said Keith Wyatt, an assistant U.S. attorney, according to a transcript of the hearing. “They’re free to take whatever pictures they can take.”

Army Lt. Col. Richard Steele said the government’s position as explained in court Saturday didn’t represent a change in policy. Reporters can watch recovery efforts they come upon, but they won’t be embedded with search teams.

“We’re not going to bar, impede or prevent” the media from telling the story, he said. “We’re just not going to give the media a ride.”

Pissing on the side of a cockroach’s house? That’s dignity for you.

Thank goodness for journalists like Ms. Vega, who are not cowed by the illegal actions of people in authority. There aren’t enough people like her in the corporate media, which is why we need to rely on amateurs and independent sources to find out what we’re missing. Toward that end, Recording Katrina is also collecting stories from bloggers like Joel Johnson and Jacob Appelbaum are two tech wizards who are down in New Orleans helping to set up a communications center for the grassroots recovery effort. Their reporting from the field is an invaluable source of leads. Take this one, from Joel’s blog, for example:

Trouble at the Astrodome?

Last night we got a bunch of calls from disgruntled evacuees at the Astrodome who were extremely upset at their treatment in Houston. They are saying that police are arresting them for the most minor of infractions and refusing them to do simple things like wear their shirts on their head to protect from heat (probably in fear of some sort of gang symbolism). While on the phone, other volunteers here said that they could hear “lots of people yelling in the background” this morning. There’s no information about troubles there in the Houston Chronicle.

We were told by one person that they were loaded on busses to take them to sign up for new housing in Houston only to be left in a strange area while t