By Ernie Allen, President/CEO National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
December 12, 2005

When Hurricane Katrina hit, it became evident how massive the disruption and dislocation really was. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) was asked by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to spearhead the effort to find the missing and reunite families. We created the Katrina Missing Persons Hotline with a special hotline number, 888-544-5475, so that 1-800-THE-LOST, our on-going 24-hour missing children’s hotline, would not be adversely affected. The Katrina Missing Persons Hotline went live on September 5. Through Noon, December 1, we handled 32,312 calls. We have taken 4,865 reports of children missing or dislocated as a result of Hurricane Katrina and 102 children missing or dislocated as a result of Hurricane Rita (4,967 total). To date, 4,118 children have been found and reunited with their families, 83 percent of the total.

 We also used our website, www.missingkids.com, as Katrina Central, a place where people could go to view photos of children and access the list of reported missing children. The results were staggering. We normally handle one million hits per day on our website. That number grew to 20 million per day and stayed there for weeks. 

NCMEC and local law enforcement have been able to identify and reunite the last unaccompanied child in the shelters. We believe that the remaining children are not typical missing children; they are better described as fractured families. 

 Sadly, we suspect that a small number of these children did not survive the storm. We are working closely with our law enforcement partners and monitoring the process of identifying the deceased. The DOJ asked that we assist with our forensic imaging technology and specialists in this process at the appropriate time. Our forensic artists routinely do facial reconstructions from skeletal remains or morgue photos of unidentified deceased children. We are prepared to assist in this process. As the process of identifying the unidentified deceased continues, we suspect that we will find some of those for whom we are searching.

The good news is that we are resolving about 100 of these cases every day, and expect that we will be able to identify and locate most of these children in a manner of weeks, rather than months. Our commitment to these families is that no case will be closed until we either find the child or know with certainty what happened.

With the help of the media we have tried to use every opportunity to communicate directly to America’s families. We live in a time in which families are separated and disjointed every day. Nonetheless, we are saying to families that particularly when a storm or similar catastrophe looms, take it seriously, have a family emergency plan, know where to go, how to reconnect, and make sure that your loved ones are close by. We are urging parents to have current photos of their children on their person at all times, and that children have some sort of identification with key descriptive information and preferably a photograph. In the past, we used to write down a small child’s name and address on a piece of paper and put it in their shoe. In the 21st Century, we can do better than that, but the basic commonsense of this old-fashioned idea has never been more evident. 

The challenge of bringing families back together in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was overwhelming. But we are proud of the role of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and our demonstrated ability to reunite families with the children of the storm.