One of the most painful problems Hurricane Katrina’s devastation created is of families left wondering if and where their relatives are alive.
In the hope of reuniting families — some of which have been scattered hundreds of miles apart — many people have created Web sites designed to match missing evacuees with their families. But some Web site creators said they think there are too many sites that add to the confusion of people trying to locate their families.
Liz Clinkenbeard, spokesperson for Yahoo!, said the company’s co-founder, David Filo, created a meta search site, which searches multiple sites at once to streamline the search for missing relatives.
“The reason this site was created is because there are just too many sites out there,” she told the Daily Reveille.
Clinkenbeard said Yahoo! sent 15 volunteers to Houston on Sept. 2 to provide evacuees with computers and Internet access to help find and contact missing relatives. She said one of the main obstacles to finding people was that the many databases available were not linked to one another.
“There was a big need and a demand for a site like this,” she said.
Clinkenbeard said Yahoo!’s search engine searches 29 of the most popular missing-persons Web sites, including www.RedCross.org and www.MissingKids.com, and returns the results within a matter of seconds.
John Hills, public relations director for Next of Kin Relatives Inc., said he thinks that some of the Web sites that appeared during the days after Katrina meant well but are causing more chaos than organization.
“We’ve been around for two years, and at the time of the disaster, we had more than 5 million people in our database,” Hills said. “There are as many as a hundred sites out there, and they really do cause problems. We need a central location for people to go to minimize confusion.”
Hills said NOKR had a team of volunteers who went into the hurricane-ravaged region and gathered information about missing people by hand and contacted the relatives they were able to find on an individual basis.
“It was just something we felt compelled to do,” he said.
Justin Harper, a Georgia Tech student who started his own missing person Web site, said he also agrees that there are too many sites for finding people.
“Starting a [missing persons] Web site seems to be the fashionable thing to do,” Harper said in an e-mail. “It’s nice to have so many people willing to do good, but I think it’s gotten to the point where it’s hurting people more than it is doing good. I’m all for innovation but not repetition.”
Harper said his Web site, www.Katrina-Survivor.com, was among the first to be made available on the Internet.
Harper said his database includes about 13,000 people and has been able to reunite more than 1,000 people with their families.
“I have had several ‘thank you’ e-mails from some of those gracious for the information,” Harper said.
Mario Profaca, a journalist who runs a Web site that focuses primarily on locating missing Croatian Americans, said he thinks there might be a more selfish reason for people starting independent missing persons databases.
“Sadly, they do it sometimes just to attract more visitors to certain Web pages,” Profaca said in an e-mail. “Desperate people need to get reliable information about their loved ones as quickly as possible, and multiple Web sites disperse queries and answers and waste cyberspace.”
Contact Jeff Jeffrey at [email protected]