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Errors in evacuation

BY TINA SUSMAN | STAFF WRITER

December 4, 2005

NEW ORLEANS - As investigators struggle to resolve the cases of hundreds of children missing since Hurricane Katrina, they and relief workers who specialize in crises say the evacuation of New Orleans was fraught with missteps that made a chaotic situation far worse.

Families were split up. Evacuees were diverted to different destinations at the last minute, scattering people across 48 states. In many shelters, registration of arrivals was spotty, making it easy for people - particularly unaccompanied children - to vanish into the crowds. People who specialize in handling traumatized children often were not among those staffing shelters.

As a result, more than 1,300 children remain missing, and shortly after Katrina, that number was higher than 4,800. While most of those still missing probably are safe somewhere, the information needed to find them just isn't there, said Bob O'Brien of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

"Typical things like names, dates of birth, next of kin ... that information has been a challenge to find," O'Brien said.

"If there were better accountability, these missing numbers would not be anything like this," he said. "But some of these cases ... in five years, there might be some that are still unresolved."

Christine Petrie of the International Rescue Committee, which specializes in handling mass migrations resulting from catastrophe, visited several shelters in Louisiana shortly after the storm and said most could not say how many evacuees they were housing.

"We'd say, 'Well, aren't you keeping a list of everyone?' They said no, because too many people were coming and going," said Petrie.

Nobody questions the desire of those involved in the evacuation to help storm victims. The problem, they say, is that good-heartedness isn't enough, especially when dealing with young people who have found themselves alone and who need special attention.

"The key to dealing with separated children is early registration. You need more than just a name - you need to find out who they were with, why they were separated, what they remember," said Mike Wessells of the Christian Children's Fund, which works with children affected by trauma. "You have to know how to talk to children to elicit useful information."

But Wessells said that when his organization offered to do this in Oklahoma, where some unaccompanied children were among evacuees housed at a military camp, it was turned down by the Red Cross and federal officials managing the camp, who cited evacuees' privacy.

Such concerns were understandable, but as a result, a lot of expertise was never used, said Wessells, who described this as part of a "total system failure."

"There seemed to be a systematic lack of awareness at all levels" at how to handle unaccompanied children, he said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency referred calls on the subject to the Red Cross, which oversaw most shelters. A Red Cross spokeswoman, Renita Hosler, agreed that sudden diversions of evacuees to different states created difficulties, but she said that under the circumstances, "the authorities were doing the best they could, just managing search-and-rescue and trying to save lives."

If unaccompanied children arrived at shelters and were determined to not have proper guardianship, they were turned over to local authorities, Hosler said.

Jane Warburton, of the International Rescue Committee, blamed part of the problem on assumptions by everyone involved - evacuees as well as their handlers - that the United States' first-world technology, such as e-mail, would overcome any problems.

"When that didn't work, people were at a loss," she said, offering an example of how things were handled in another catastrophe: the Pakistani earthquake. When injured children were separated from their families to be flown elsewhere for medical treatment, their names were simply scrawled on their skin.

In times of crisis, she said her organization sometimes recommends that parents actually tie their children to them to prevent them from getting lost.

"One thing this has done is show the need for some very basic and robust systems that don't rely on the technology and communication means that we had assumed would work," she said. "It's been a pretty harsh lesson."