Fresh Loaf

… for up-to-the-minute reports on blocked roads and what parts of town to avoid. As well as photos of the flooded areas.

Here’s a link to an #atlflood thread. Here’s a link to an #atltraffic thread. For links to official closed roads, check out our previous post.

And when the storm passes, send some karma to SpaceyG and DriveAFasterCar (she of #atlgas fame) for helping kickstart these hashtags. (We’ve also set up a feed for the #atlflood updates on our news page, clatl.com/news).

After the jump, an idea of just how bad the roads really are.

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Christa at Pecanne Log says I say someone else says Bill Murray is loose in Atlanta. One night he’s at Loca Luna buying drinks for strangers. Another night he’s watching the Hawks play the Cleveland Cavaliers. Supposedly, he’s filming this flick. I’m still waiting for him to get a pedicure with me.

Buzz Brockway at Peach Pundit says the site’s bloggers won’t retaliate against state lawmakers who voted for Senate Bill 31, a controversial piece of legislation they adamantly opposed. The complex bill would allow Georgia Power to recover financing costs in advance for two proposed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle. The Punditeers got into a tiff with the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a free-market think tank, about the issue. No hard feelings, the bloggers say, but they’d still like a clear explanation of the foundation’s stance on the issue. (Just one more: Jason Shepard at the site finds Georgia’s facebook page shows an unexpected “friend.”

Remember #atlgas? Grift links to a Nightline report in which the Twitter hashtag that saved Atlanta’s ass is mentioned.

Decatur’s wi-fi cloud is “complete,” Decatur Metro reports.

Jim Galloway at the AJC’s Political Insider sneaks a peek at preliminary numbers which show Georgia’s rush of newcomers — aka the growth industry, the state’s bread and butter — might be slowing. He writes a powerful post about the subject.

Want solid political commentary recorded here in Atlanta? The new Kudzu Vine podcast is posted and available for download.

Doug at Live Apartment Fire points us to a recent piece by Tom Jones, the WSB-TV reporter who won’t work for nobody but you. Jones covered the search for a man who’s allegedly been flashing children in the Grant Park area. The suspect’s ripped a page from afterschool specials and is offering candy to the tykes.

Travis Fain wants the old Speaker Glenn Richardson back. I second that.

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— Live Apartment Fire takes a look at the coverage of the voodoo lady that Cobb County Commissioner Annette Kesting allegedly tried to hire to off her opponent. The kicker? South Carolina authorities say they could charge Kesting with solicitation for murder.

— Esquire magazine takes a look at the Congressional races and compiles a list of the 10 worst lawmakers in America. As Lucid Idiocy notes, guess who’s first on that list?

— And speaking of the distinguished senator, JMac at Safe As Houses smells a well-deserved upset in the making and couldn’t be more excited.

— At Terminal Station, B King wonders whether the Obama-effect could spur a series of upsets in local races. There are, he points out, thousands of newly-registered voters who are likely to be Democrat.

— There’s less than a month to go in the presidential race and at Politits, Dcup wants to remind us that there’s a major difference between a smear and negative campaigning.

— What’s a twitter? DriftGrift wasn’t so sure, either until his blog buddy Tessa (who is featured in CL) set up a system that helped Internet-savvy Atlantans find gasoline. Now he’s a believer.

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The person who gave the most help to Atlantans struggling to find gas in recent weeks wasn’t a governor, a mayor, or even a reporter.

Tessa Horehled is a marketing consultant and author of the popular local culture blog Drive A Faster Car.

While tracking down gas for her mother two weeks ago, Horehled used her mobile phone to post the location of stations that did (and didn’t) have gas to her micro-blog hosted on Twitter.com.

“I was trying to help people not run out of gas while they were driving around [looking for it],” she says.

Horehled included the characters #atlgas in her gas-related posts, and asked people who follow her on Twitter who spotted gas to do the same. The characters, called hashmarks, allow anyone with a computer or a mobile phone to view an up-to-the minute list of metro Atlanta gas sightings.

By the weekend, #atlgas went viral. Horehled’s online friends began posting to #atlgas, followed by their friends, etc. By Monday morning, gas-starved, web-enabled Atlantans turned #atlgas into the fourth most commonly searched phrase on Twitter.

“We beat ‘Sarah Palin’ at one point,” she says. “I consider that a success.”

Though proud her simple idea has proven so popular and so useful to so many people, she’s disappointed that neither city nor state officials have harnessed Twitter to either gather or spread information about gas availability to the community.

“It’s free and you can use it with almost any cell phone,” she says, adding that she’d be happy to give the Mayor and the Governor a quick tutorial.

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Here’s a welcome sight — a gas station with gas, but no lines.

I hope this means the gas shortage is easing.

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In an exclusive interview with Creative Loafing, God asked gasoline-starved Georgians to make up their minds already.

“You prayed for rain, so I gave unto you an exceptionally active Atlantic hurricane season,” the Almighty said today. “Now you’re nagging because my wind-borne servants, Gustav and Ike, slowed your gasoline production. I swear there’s no pleasing some people.”

The Lord added that He’s going to be pretty busy with the nation’s financial crisis for a few days and would be grateful if Georgians didn’t bug him with any more liquid-based prayers this week.

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Gov. Sonny Perdue has asked Pres. Bush to release crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. (Click here to view the letter to the president.)

“As President Bush and Congress work on a plan to rescue our financial markets, I urge them to also focus on our fuel shortage in the Southeast,” Perdue said in a release. “As refinery capacity is returning to pre-hurricane levels, I believe a surge in crude from the Reserve would bridge the gap until full production resumes and lessen the impact of shortages on the daily lives of our citizens.”

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, 57.4 percent of crude oil production in the Gulf of Mexico is out, a slight improvement from Friday. Three refineries re-opened over the weekend; two refineries remain completely shut down. Oil is on the way, they say.

Keep us posted, governor. In the meantime, Georgians will continue to keep each other informed via Twitter.

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I’ll start this off by saying I’m not exactly sure what price gouging is. I’m under the impression that charging as much for something as you can is capitalism. I don’t quite understand when and how a price hike for a scarce product becomes crime.

With that in mind, I’d like to request the state lift price gouging restrictions on gasoline immediately. I’d rather pay $10/gallon for a couple weeks than spend four hours on Friday and Saturday hunting for gasoline.

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I drive a 1973 Mercedes that runs on petro-diesel, biodiesel, or any combination of the two.

This means I do not have to wait in long lines to fill up my tank as there is plenty of diesel around town.

Unfortunately, this also means I can’t use “I don’t have gas” as an excuse to work from home this week.

Doh!

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Searching for gasoline in Atlanta is one of the most popular uses of the micro-blogging service Twitter this morning, according to Twitter’s list of most-searched topics.

Note: #atlgas is the only non-national topic on the list.

If you have no clue what I’m talking about — web-enabled Atlantans are blogging the location of stations with gasoline by blogging it to Twitter along with the characters #atlgas. Including #atlgas in the message allows people to find up-to-minute gasoline sightings simply by searching for the characters #atlgas.

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