I have no idea why, but I've occasionally wondered what would happen if we had to start over. Like, if we somehow lost all the technology we have developed over thousands of years, leaving only the knowledge we have gained, how long would it take us to get back to where we are today, and how would we do it? If we were armed with nothing but minerals, animals, and vegetables but knew about the possibility of things like the automobile and the internet, how would we create them? With foreknowledge of things like pollution, how might we do things differently?
When I asked myself these questions, I was mainly thinking about many of the inefficiencies that pop up as we try to move ahead as a civilization. I once read that the fax machine will be viewed by history as a pretty much unnecessary invention whose only purpose was to move us from snail mail to email. When you think about it, it makes sense: if we had it to do all over again, we would probably just go straight to email, bypassing the fax machine altogether. Our history is probably full of places where we took a serpentine route toward a more "ideal" technology, but the question of how we could have done things differently is largely academic. Or is it?
When Hurricane Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands of people, families were torn completely apart and, in many cases, sent to shelters at opposite ends of the country. Without warning, the communities housing those who were evacuated were forced to create some way to document these individuals and get them in touch with their loved ones. Since these evacuees arrived with little or no documentation and carried cell phones that no longer worked, the struggle of these shelters to reinsert these people back into society reads like a condensed history of communication. In many cases, we have served these displaced Americans well by adapting our high-tech capabilities to their low-tech circumstances. But in other cases, we have acted as though we haven't been there before.
When I arrived at the Reliant complex (which includes the Astrodome, the Reliant Center, and Reliant Arena) on Monday, September 5, at 6:00 a.m., about 25,000 former residents of the New Orleans area had been living there for between two and four days. I arrived with my laptop because I had learned that people with wireless-enabled laptops were needed, and I was assigned to something called Operation Get In Touch, which I learned was a website set up by Pinnacle Wireless specifically for Katrina victims.
When I entered the Reliant Center, I sat down at a long row of tables, plugged in, and was immediately struck by the wall in front of me. A big banner high on the wall said, "Sign In Here," and below that, stretched across about 100 feet, were the letters A to Z. Below that were thousands of index cards and hundreds of sheets of paper and posterboards. On each card, or paper, or poster, was basic information about an evacuee (often no more than first and last name) and the names of people he was looking for. The cards served two functions: they were the first forms of official registration for residents (though it's unclear how many residents actually signed in), and they allowed residents to see who else had arrived, giving them an opportunity to find lost loved ones.
To anyone who's been alive in the past fifty years, the idea of cards taped to a wall as a means of tracking 25,000 people may seem inadequate, and it is. But keep in mind that when these people arrived documentation was close to the last thing on anyone's mind, never mind the fact that the computer power to enter these people in some kind of database was not available (I was told that as late as Sunday the Reliant Center still had only one computer for getting people registered).
I was quickly informed that I would be entering registration information for residents of the Reliant Center into an online database as well as using existing online tools to help residents find lost friends and family. The written information we were to enter had, I think, been taken down by volunteers who had talked to evacuees. It was asked whether we would be entering the information contained in the cards on the wall. At that time, nobody in our area knew.
Entering evacuees' information into the database was simple enough, but it was clear that the information we were getting from people was not always sufficient. Information that would allow us to distinguish duplicate names, things like middle names and birth dates, were not always supplied. Still, having the information in a searchable database was a huge step up from keeping information on paper only.
For people who came to us wanting to look for lost relatives, we were given two main websites to search through: the one we had been entering information into (Get In Touch), and the Red Cross self registry that they had been encouraging people to use in shelters spread across the country. I added a couple sites I already knew about, put together by CNN and MSNBC to my go-to list of databases. In the beginning of this process of connecting people, I'd have to describe the system that evolved as a marketplace, in the sense that each website had its own market or demographic that it appealed to and, in the absence of a clear standard, the strengths and weaknesses of each website helped determine how well it was going to compete. For instance, the Get In Touch website initially had the best search capability of any website. The problem was that it was just getting off the ground in terms of number of entries, and the entries it had were sometimes incomplete. The Red Cross website had a ton of information right off the bat, but the way it searched its entries could be confusing. When a woman approached me and asked me to look for her son (who had a common first name but a unique last name) I simply typed in the last name, which turned up no matches. Then, out of curiosity, I tried entering both the first name and the last name, and I got a match. The Red Cross website simply has a list of entries, and conducting a search takes you to a place on the list based on the first letters you entered. So searching for "John Smith" will take you to the middle of the J's and "Smith John" will take you to the middle of the S's. Websites for news organizations, as well as the Family Messages site, included many people who had left on their own in addition to those who were evacuated, but initially these sites were very limited, probably to people who had independent access to television or the internet.
Lack of a standard is something networks deal with all the time. Think of Monday morning's family connection network as kind of like VHS and Beta back in the 1980s. Just like Betamax owners ran the risk of missing out on entertainment options through their choice of an unpopular platform, searchers who looked through an unpopular database also risked missing out. Except instead of being unable to view a VHS copy of Wargames, they were ignorant of the fact that a loved one they were searching for was sitting on a different website.
Enter Yahoo. Seeing the need for a single destination for searchers, Yahoo created a site that indexed every existing Katrina search out there. I learned about it early Monday afternoon, and it was a godsend. Now I would no longer search twelve sites and worry that the thirteenth site might have held useful information. Well, sort of. Initially, the Yahoo site didn't index a lot of the information on the Red Cross and Get In Touch websites, so I used the three together.
Eventually, Yahoo was able to index every major database successfully, and as our search capability became more refined we concentrated on including more people in the database. We dismantled the wall of index cards and started entering all the information into our computers. After Labor Day, though, the volunteers who showed up with laptops were few and far between, and data entry progressed slowly.
Throughout the week, more shelters came online, and connecting families switched from a nearly hopeless endeavor to a fairly reliable process. As it did, my job evolved from finding people to helping people get back on their feet: searching for job resources, lending out my cell phone, and helping people navigate the maze of services at the Reliant complex.
And it was a maze of services. Between the post office, insurance services, job assistance, travel assistance, FEMA assistance, and many others, residents easily got confused preparing to leave the complex. There was an order of operations that had to be followed, which, because it was neither obvious nor well communicated, had people stopping by the same place three and four times. Also, because they had been put up in a haphazard fashion, many of these services would switch places every couple days, which meant that maps often had people going to the wrong place. Oh yeah, and there were redundant services in the three buildings that were often unaware of each other. On Friday I made my first trip to the Astrodome to put up some advertisements for Operation Get in Touch. At one point I ran into the people from Continental Airlines, who were giving people free airfare and were happy to know where my group was located because they had received many questions. On the other end of the stadium, along the dark concourse, were a group of people at computers who were helping evacuees search for lost relatives and were quite upset that I was advertising the same service in another building.
The communication between buildings was never great, but it did the job. Except for the PA system, which was unique to each building and had about a 1% success rate of paging people, everyone found what they were looking for sooner or later. By the following Monday (September 12), the residents of the shelters were able to access one of about fifty desktop computers that had been set up for them. The volunteers at the laptops still conducted searches and entered information, but once residents could independently look for relatives and send email, communication became much easier. As the Yahoo page was working well for everyone who came to see us, we turned our attention to the people who could not make it over to us. The Reliant Center housed many elderly evacuees who had neither entered their names into the database nor searched for others. We brought our laptops to their cots and sat and searched with them, so that by the middle of my second week at the shelters everyone theoretically had access to the evacuee information on the internet.
As we improved our ability to keep track of people, there were fewer people there to keep track of. Starting at about 25,000 on September 4, the population of the Reliant Complex dwindled to 4500 on September 11, then less than 1500 on September 18. By September 20, plans were in place to move the remaining 1000 evacuees to Fort Smith, Arkansas, in preparation for Hurricane Rita. The facility they left behind displayed signs of the progress the Reliant complex had undergone. On my last day at the facility (which was actually a couple days before the last evacuees had left), there were computers doing pretty much all of the work, while posters still covered the vast hallways and seating sections of the Astrodome. The process that connected index cards to computers was a disjointed one, and it’s unfortunate that some residents were required to reregister a few times before they would be located. But the result was actually a very interesting lesson about the dynamics of an impromptu organization.
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