It wasn’t just Katrina

Hurricane Katrina - my year (Part 6)

We were dealing with hundreds of thousands of people who were being scattered all over the US in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, but, silly me, I did not realise in mid-September that our task in locating missing people was about to get much harder.

While we were busy on the Katrina Evacuee Help Center, I kept a watch on tropical storm alerts from NOAA. Hurricane Rita formed as a tropical storm over the Turks and Caicos Islands on September 18. The storm reached Category 2 intensity as it moved south of the Florida Keys on September 20. Rapid intensification ensued as Rita moved into the Gulf of Mexico, and Rita became a Category 5 hurricane on the 21st, becoming the third (at that time) most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin. People who had been evacuated to shelters suddenly found those shelters evacuating ahead of hurricane Rita. People whose location we had found, were on the move, without the means to let family and friends know.

We were in contact with some of the shelters, but the sheer number of people crowding these refuges meant there was no way our volunteers could update records in advance of evacuation. Besides, volunteers on the ground were also evacuating. The missing persons disaster that occurred following Katrina was rapidly escalating.

The Katrina Evacuee Help Center had been set up on disastersearch.org to, well, help Katrina evacuees. We realised that with hurricane Rita headed for the Gulf Coast, people who were not directly affected by Katrina were evacuating and what we were doing would spread to encompass new missing persons. We had already realised that the software development done on disastersearch.org would continue, and we could easily set up to handle multiple evacuation events. So, we renamed our services and KEHC became Disastersearch.

Disaster on top of disaster was looming and little more than three weeks after Katrina hit, we had to prepare to extend our services to cope with any needs Rita may throw up. Shelters we had been working with were closed. Trying to find information about where people were being sent was difficult. And right from the start of the evacuations, we were getting calls for help from people who had been separated as shelters closed.

Rita made landfall on September 24 near the Texas-Louisiana border as a Category 3 hurricane. The hurricane continued on through parts of southeast Texas. The storm surge caused extensive damage along the Louisiana and extreme southeastern Texas coasts and completely destroyed some coastal communities. The storm killed seven people directly; many others died in evacuations and from indirect effects. More missing persons registrations came in. People who had been found were missing again. We got volunteers into the Dallas Convention Center and the Reunion Arena. ETCI, a technology company, set up volunteer teams in Dallas and had their teams working for both the Red Cross and Disastersearch. We had people in Houston trying to match evacuees with missing persons notifications. And the hurricanes kept coming.

Hurricane Tammy made a brief appearance in early October, but came to nothing much. Then Wilma formed. Dr John Long, of Delaware (my fellow Director on Disastersearch) has a background in meteorology, and we got used to following the NOAA storm reports. Disastersearch is a “one stop” resource and includes feeds from NOAA, and also evacuation alerts. We had to keep ourselves completely up to date with developments and report on evacuations as they were called. Not an easy task as we could not get responses from city and State governments to our requests for information and collaboration. We set up a system so authorities could send evacuation announcements to us via SMS text messaging and these would immediately be published on the site. No responses, and nobody used this.

Hurricane Wilma formed on October 17 in the western Caribbean and rapidly strengthened. On October 19 it became the strongest tropical cyclone on record in the Atlantic basin, with 185 mph (295 km/h) winds. The hurricane moved slowly and struck Quintana Roo on October 22 as a Category 4 hurricane, causing very heavy damage to Cancún and Cozumel. After emerging into the Gulf of Mexico, Wilma passed north of Cuba before striking southern Florida on the 24th as a Category 3 storm, then moving into the Atlantic Ocean and becoming extratropical. We suddenly found we were getting huge numbers of hits on our Spanish language pages, and were dealing with anxious Americans trying to get news from Mexico at a time when the people there were unable to make contact with the outside world. The few messages that were coming through to us showed that it does not matter where a disaster takes place, sites such as Disastersearch are of use anywhere anyone has internet access or cellphone coverage.

This is part 6 of my series about hurricane Katrina and my involvement with Disastersearch. I will be wrapping up with the final post of the series in a day or two. While I have been writing this to explain what I have been doing and why, to residents of my city, Palmerston North in New Zealand, I think I am also writing as much for me. This past year has been one of very long hours and hard work. It has been emotionally draining. It has been hugely rewarding when we have reunited people, and terribly distressing that so many are still missing. Our work continues.