GCN Katrina Survivor-Connector Database Continues to
Connect Katrina's Missing by Keith Burton - GulfCoastNews.com Among the great tragedies that came out of Hurricane Katrina resulted from people becoming displaced from evacuations to locations around the country and from the loss of people in the cities affected by the hurricane. Immediately after the storm, people sought ways to find their relatives and friends and GulfCoastNews.com played a key role to help. GulfCoastNews.com was the first in the nation to establish an online
database for people to list the missing from While numerous versions of Katrina databases appeared after the hurricane, almost all of them are now offline or unavailable to people still seeking missing Katrina survivors. And so far, according to Knight-Ridder news reports, no national list has been established and no centralized list will be available for the next hurricane season. GCN will maintain the GCN Katrina Survivor-Connector Database as there are still people looking for survivors displaced by the hurricane. GCN will also provide another list for any future storm if possible.
While GCN is now operating on a different server with Interland, the site remains fast to access and easy to operate by users. Currently the database contains the names of over 76,716 people displaced by Katrina. The database lists people as "alive," "missing," and "unknown." The names are generated by users of the database such as family members, volunteer organizations and emergency service workers. The list is searchable by name, city, and state by users online. While most people on the list are listed as "alive" in the database, there are some 8,247 total currently listed as Missing on the database, and some 27,611 total listed as Unknown Since November 1, 2005, there has been 350 people listed as missing and unknown from about 690 entries. These names include many from the Gulf Coast area in Mississippi and from New Orleans. This list in an Excel file form is available online. The database can be amended by users and GCN would hope people would update the records they have entered, but obviously many of the names of missing and unknowns listed in the database could have been located. But with people still listing missing and unknowns on the database, there is clearly a huge number of people whose status by their relatives and friends has not been determined. GCN's database was designed to be fast and simple to use online. It was engineered by Ken Burton, a computer scientist who lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The GCN Katrina Survivor-Connector Database is accessed from the GulfCoastNews.com main page. For more information on the GCN Katrina-Survivor Database email GCN.
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In the days
immediately after Katrina, the use of GCN's Katrina database overwhelmed
our initial servers but through the contribution of Interland Inc. of
Atlanta Georgia, which contributed servers and technical support staff,
GCN was able to ramp up bandwidth and the programming to handle the huge
traffic on the site. Interland was among some 40 major corporations that
responded to an appeal for help by GCN's contributing writer Perry Hicks,
who had appeared on Fox News shortly after hurricane and appealed for
help. Interland is a major Internet hosting service.