Where's the list of the missing? No registry, no comfort for Katrina fams.

By JOSHUA NORMANjdnorman@sunherald.comThere is no national registry for missing people after a natural disaster and there are no plans to establish one in time for the coming hurricane season, according to government spokespeople.

A lack of a national call center would be no problem if, as Hurricane Katrina has made many realize, the disaster that caused people to become missing did not span multiple states.

There are approximately 300 cases of missing people in South Mississippi that are still unsolved because of poor communications and a waste of time and resources in the weeks and months after Katrina came ashore, according to several local officials involved in the search.

This is no comfort to those still seeking loved ones, like the families of Tonette Jackson, Clay Lee Lantier, Claudia Morrison and Larry Blackmon, all of whom have been missing since Aug. 29.
"We haven't heard from him," said Biloxi resident Pamela Magee, Blackmon's ex-girlfriend and mother of his 17-year-old son, Prince. "I think he stayed at home, at Back Bay Apartments, and got washed away."

No official list of missing people has been released by any state agencies, said Deloris Lewis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Safety, which is supposed to be coordinating the search. There are no plans to release the list or any information on the missing people, she said.

When someone is reported missing, a case is opened and their recent history is investigated.

After Katrina, a team of about 15 people from a wide swath of law agencies was assembled at a call center to investigate each case. The call center was established by the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT), which is a volunteer group of morticians, dentists, etc., that assist local health officials following major disasters. They are funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

By about mid-December, the number of unsolved cases at the Mississippi call center had been reduced to about 30 or so, thanks in large part to the hard work of the team, said Gary Hargrove, the Harrison County coroner involved in the search for missing people from the beginning.

At the same time, a similar call center was established by a DMORT team in New Orleans, and their number was advertised nationally on many major news networks, Hargrove said.

During this time, Hargrove said he had repeatedly asked officials in charge of the Louisiana hotline to forward any requests for missing Mississippi residents to the Mississippi hotline and that he and his team would do the same for the Louisiana hotline operators.

"We had two meetings here (with Louisiana missing people hotline officials) about forwarding Mississippi information to us," Hargrove said. "That didn't happen. They sat on this information. We had our missing person task force up and going and we were getting a lot of stuff done. We were able to track a lot of people down."

Then on New Year's Eve, an official in charge of the Louisiana hotline showed up with a box with 300 new cases, Hargrove said.

"When we shut down our missing persons operation, all of a sudden here they come... dropping in all these files," Hargrove said. "Now we have to re-task people. We're trying to work it in with our regular duties."

There actually have been several drop-offs of new cases since New Year's, and Hargrove said many cases have ended up being redundancies from cases they solved the first time around. Still, to this day, 256 of those cases brought over from Louisiana remain unsolved.

FEMA representative Marie Hudak denied that FEMA had any responsibility for, knowledge of or involvement with the search for missing people and the subsequent confusion that Hargrove described. Hudak did, however, admit that DMORT is accountable to FEMA.

Regardless of who is to blame for that particular confusion, the ultimate fault here lies with the lack of a unified national system, said Leah Stokes, Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman.

"The issue we had with Katrina was that it was a multi-state disaster," Stokes said. "The phone lines everywhere were jammed. There was no system set up for sharing all that information."

As far as she knew, Stokes said, no plans have been made on any level of government for the coming hurricane season to set up such a database, either.

"It made responding and rescue missions more difficult," Stokes said. "It really slowed some of the response efforts. Just to be on the safe side, multiple search and rescue teams (ended up going out) with the same address."

Complicating things was the refusal by Red Cross officials to share the names of people in their shelters, citing privacy policies, Stokes said. It took a couple of weeks and a court order to get the names of children staying in their shelters, because it is illegal to withhold information on the whereabouts of children reported missing under any circumstance.

While Red Cross officials were unable to be reached before press time for this story, Stokes said she had not heard of any negotiations to make information on evacuees easier to obtain from them.

"The federal government needs to look into a national tracking system (for evacuees and disaster victims) of some kind," Stokes said. "It makes no sense that we can't track them."

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Staff writer Pete Tattersall contributed to this report.

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