FEMA Cuts Through Red Tape To Find Missing Children

Arkansas is still home to thousands left homeless by the hurricanes. Many of those people are still looking for their families. It took three months for Elzina Wright to find one of her granddaughters. The red tape has been cut to hopefully make it easier for families to find each other.

In the days after Hurricane Katrina, it became all too familiar a cry. "You don't have anything," says Wright. "You don't know where your children are at. You're looking at little children screaming and hollering."

Wright evacuated to Little Rock from her home in New Orleans' 9th Ward. She and many other parents spent days, even months, desperately searching for their missing families. "I wasn't worrying too much about living if I had lost all of them," she says. Now, nearly four months later, hundreds of Katrina's littlest victims are still reported missing.

Walter Fahr with Louisiana's Missing and Exploited Children's Center says, "I think we're kinda down to we have no clues where these people are, these last 400 or so." He says FEMA has a comprehensive list of evacuees and their contact information. But for months, FEMA didn't share its database-- citing privacy issues. "Trying to locate current addresses or people, identifying information, it's very difficult and very frustrating," explains Fahr. "You need the assistance of many different agencies."

Thursday, that bureaucratic log-jam preventing many families from being reunited may have been broken when FEMA agreed to share the database with the FBI. Friday, 35 cases were solved.

That's good news for Wright who's still looking for some of her extended family. She just wishes it would have happened sooner and has this message for FEMA. "You didn't respond fast enough, you didn't show enough compassion. It wasn't FEMA or nobody else. It was the Lord who had the compassion on us."

FEMA's decision may make it possible for more families to be reunited before Christmas.

Michelle Chism, Producer
Created: 12/23/2005 11:02:29 PM
Updated: 12/23/2005 11:04:35 PM Link Here