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A summary of the links,
searches and other resources that were
once established to bring together people who were blown
apart by Katrina and her aftermath.
Three years later, there are still people
missing from New Orleans after Katrina. (Forums page, NOLA
missing persons forum, 8/18/08 0.32 ET - “missing
brother”)
I have checked
the links and those that are still active in September 2008,
are shown in full. Those that worked during and after Katrina,
but are not working as of August 31, 2008, are shown with a
line through the letters or numbers.
NEW! CNN is devoting the weekend of 9/17/05 and
9/18/05 to display of pictures of the children who have been
separated from their families; the hope is that many can be
reunited with their families. We hope that
CNN can find a less exploitive way to boost its ratings for
coverage of Hurricane Gustav. Perhaps they can prepare
a web page with the pictures, and point to it on
air, and keep a tally of families reunited with
brief brief videos of the
reunion.
This page is devoted to registries
and Katrina-specific searches. On the Navigation Bar above is
a link to the Forum Page, where you will find both listings of
the safe and the missing, as well as Katrina-specific
discussions.
Registries
Attention has focused on the missing
children, with the publication on September 5, 2005 of the
Katrina-specific site by the National Center for Missing and
Exploited Children. Pictures of the unidentified
children are posted
at their web
site.
As of 8/31/08, there is one child, among the
affected states, who is still lost.
If you know
someone who is stranded by flooding, contact the United States
Coast Guard
Search and Rescue
. There are phone
numbers as well as registration forms. The
U.S.Government FirstCall web site is still back at Katrina and
Rita. They may soon get their act
together–or not.
Update: Monday
9/5/05; The New Orleans Times-Picayune has urgent bulletin board posts calling
for the rescue of specific people
here.
If
it’s needed in 2008, they will do it.
A major resource is the
International Committee of the Red Cross registries, which I
remember from the Kosovo refugee crisis. Their lists begin at
this page. You can consult a list, register yourself,
and register your relative, all with links from their “locate”
page. Each link is also listed in the green area to the
right. This is the same thing as the American
Red Cross Family Locater, the number the
President gave in his September 15, 2008speech,
1-877-568-3317.
CNN
has great resources and can be counted on to maintain
their list pages for a long time.
For
Katrina and Rita, the lists were kept up for six months, then
archived for a year, then deleted — an approximate
accounting.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune
(NOLA) lists are now on the Forums Page.
The software at
Family messages.org is impressive; they now list people
registered alphabetically by state, and color coded as to
current status.
This is the one locator
site that is already up and running for Hurricane Gustav, and
for affected families in every state in Gustav’s expected
path.
The American Red Cross is a day or two
late, but as of 9/02/05 they have a link to the ICRC Family
Links site, listed above. More to the point is their special
telephone number 1-877-LOVED-1S.
Another resource may be the National Next of Kin Registry (NOKR), which has
a disaster registry you may want to use. They are
a private, non-profit organization.
The first locator attempt by the USA.gov web site was, mildly put,
not very good, so it was not included here. Now there is a
range of generally good information on whom to contact for
what, and where. The site includes searches, housing,
employer-employee contacts, and more. Still (8/31/08) related to Katrina and Rita.
It definitely merits a place on this list now.
For the South
Mississippi area, the combination list maintained by the Gulf Coast News numbers over 40,000.
Searches
The ultimate search tool has
appeared on the web, but is hard to
find.
IceRocket is a search engine
for blogs, but they have set up their search engine
to search names at the International Committee for the
Red Cross, NOLA sites, MSNBC, and Yahoo.
Hurray!
The search engine Lycos
has amassed a good selection of web sites
devoted to reuniting evacuees with family and friends.
Google, too, has entered the fray
with a Katrina-specific
search page
. On examination, it seems far more limited than one
would anticipate. That is, the primary database search seems to
be using only the 20,000 names registered
at KatrinaSafe.com. Although Google mentions the
International Committee for the Red Cross searches, it is not
clear that they actually have access to them–though I don’t
know why not. The Google site recommends signing up with
KatrinaSafe.
com, a
website which obscures its origins. Once again we have a
commercial site with almost no background or “about”
information, and warnings that your personal data is
not private.
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