Hurricane Katrina - my year (Part 1)

Sunday was my daughter’s birthday and late last night I found myself reflecting on how one event can change someone’s life forever. My life changed when my daughter was born. On her last birthday, however, I had no inkling that little more than ten days later my life would change again, almost overnight, and set me on a course I could never have imagined.

In late August 2005, I watched as I am sure many others did, the television news reports of the development of the fifth hurricane of the Atlantic hurricane season. I saw the footage as Katrina swept across Florida and marvelled at the resiliance of Floridians who seem to manage to handle anything nature throws at them. As reports started saying that hurricane Katrina was building up strength over the Gulf of Mexico and was predicted to again make landfall, this time on the Gulf Coast, I began to be alarmed for the safety of an online friend. TJay and his wife were living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I knew him through our mutual involvement in open source software development. Although hurricane Katrina was building up on the other side of the world from New Zealand, knowing people who were evacuating made it just a little personal to me. I had no idea how personal hurricane Katrina would become.

Shortly before midnight on August 29th, New Zealand time, hurricane Katrina made landfall as a strong category 3. Early reports coming through on August 30th indicated that the predicted devastation had not occurred. However, over a million people had evacuated and shelters throughout Louisiana and Mississippi were filling fast. One of the open source software projects I am involved with is called Joomla. Pastor Jay Dearman of Mangham, Louisiana put out a call for help on the Joomla forum.

Jay said later:

Even with the first offerings of food, water and bedding, we began to realize that it was a job too great and too important for us alone. Each of us had to call on all of our own resources and roll up our sleeves and one community I felt I could draw on was the Open Source community.Pastor Jay Dearman of Mangham, Louisiana

He was right. Within minutes of his post on the forum, Peter Koch, a former core developer of the Mambo CMS had replied. I joined Peter and we got to work. Over the following 18 hours, others answered the call and a team was born. Jay told us, “There are people posting desperate messages for help in different places all over the Internet, on news sites, and on missing persons’ registers,” Pastor Dearman said. “We need a centralized registry and we need it fast.” We had the people, we had the skills, and we had, through Jay, identified the need that technology could fill. We set out to create a website that would act as a central repository of information. It’s primary focus was on missing people. The need was immediate and urgent, so we did something few developers would consider doing - we got a site up and did our development online, on the live site.

The site was launched under the name the “Katrina Evacuee Help Center”. Jay’s brother had pulled in help and resources to get mobile networks set up in the affected areas and the first cellphones were being distributed to shelters. We designed our site to be accessible via WAP-enabled cellphone as well as through the Internet. We also provided a SOAP interface so other websites could add our search functions to their sites, making our database accessible through many different access points. And the registrations of missing people started pouring in.

By September 1st, we had purchased the disastersearch.org domain name and were already looking towards keeping the site as a permanent resource, to be used as needed in disaster situations. On 7th September, we issued our first press release to let more people know we were there, we were ready and we could help. We had 225,000 missing persons registered with us at that time.

The Katrina Evacuee Help Center had already reunited a number of families by the time the announcement was made. Within a short period, we had to move the site to two dedicated, load-balanced servers to manage the volumes of traffic to the site. Our missing persons database was growing with thousands of new registrations each day. We had created a central registry for evacuees, families looking to reunite, and the people working to assist them. In addition to the database of persons, the site also hosts a database for evacuee centers which enables people to locate shelters and which provides a means for shelters to announce their spare capacity and seek assistance as needed. We also included downloadable government aid forms, a volunteer register, morgue listings, and a job placement registry.

This was an enormous undertaking and although Peter, in Switzerland, and me in Palmerston North were able to keep up with the workload and continued to work 18-20 hour days, every day, many of our team were not able to keep up the pace. By the second week, those who had taken time off work to dedicate themselves to the Katrina Evacuee Help Center were gone and others who could come online only occasionally to help were finding the pace of change with the site difficult to keep up with.

From the start, it was decided that everyone who contacted the Katrina Evacuee Help Center should have a consistent point of contact. Peter was leading the software development while I managed the team, press, site content, registrations and all email correspondence. I still had no idea then of how much my life had changed.

Over the next week I intend to document more about my experiences with the site that became Disastersearch. I intend to offer insights into the ways in which grass-roots, volunteer initiatives can really make a difference, and about how technology is largely overlooked in emergency planning. Disastersearch is an ongoing initiative. It is still getting new missing persons registrations from the hurricane Katrina disaster and is still working to assist those who were affected by the disaster. For those of us “at the front line”, the disaster is not yet over. The pain, the loss, and the hard work continues. And Disastersearch is preparing too, for the next one.