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The media covered it a bit, but the story was quite confusing, anyway. People heare "missing children" after a hurricane, and stories start that most of them are dead, or that no one is doing anything to find them. It wasn't as clear cut as that.
After the hurricane, people all over the country tried to find relatives and friends in the area. Any time you searced online for a way to find out about relatives (I had to go through this, though all of mine were fine), you wound up on sites that encouraged you to fill out a missing person's report. I had started to fill one out on my parents, even, when they finally contacted me.
So a lot of people filled out reports to find people who were perfectly fine and would not have considered themselves lost. I was on the Coast in Mississippi, for instance, right after the hurricane, and I was helping an old friend of my parents rescue her dogs from her house, which had gone under thirty feet of water. While we were there, her in-laws from Baton Rouge showed up. THey had been trying to locate her for a week, had put out missing persons reports on her, and had come to the house several times looking for her. This was in an abandoned part of Bay St. Louis--all the houses were destroyed, you could barely get back in there with a four wheeler, and the whole area smelled of dead animals and toxic muck. This friend of ours had told everyone she was going to stay in her house, and then just before dark got scared and drove about ten miles north to stay at another friend's house--this friend had actually fled further north, so the house was empty. Anyway, most relatives thought she was dead or missing, so she was filed as missing. She wasn't--she had a circle of friends around her, she was staying with friends, and we knew where she was, but she was missing to some people.
A lot of names were like that. Divorced parents lost touch with each other, so the non-custodial parent would file missing children reports. After the post-hurricane evacuation, families were separated, and moved sometimes to several different evacuation sites, so even families were pulled apart. It's harder than you think figuring out where someone is in this country, even for adults. This last child that was found was in Atlanta, her parents were in San Antonio. For something like 9 months the parents couldn't find their child, but she was alive and safe.
So a lot of the "missing" people weren't missing, but they were missing to a few people. And of course someone would file a report, then find the person they were looking for, and never tell the people they filed the report with. Plus, scanning through the lists, you saw things like "Missing--six or seven year old child. Lisa. Last Name unknown. Race unknown." Not much way to track that. Or you saw clear mistakes--my favorite was a missing family named "Abear." Anyone in New Orleans (and many NFL fans) would recognize that name as "Hebert." No chance they would ever be found under "Abert," and very little chance that the person who reported them missing even knew them that well, if they didn't know how to spell the name.
So the media didn't spend a lot of time on the "missing" lists because they were a jumble, and the people who made the lists were constantly telling everyone that the lists were misleading, that out of 6,000 people probably only a few hundred were actually missing.
The real failure, and what the media reported sometimes but not enough, is that government wasn't doing enough to resolve these issues. FEMA and HS evacuated people to all corners of the planet and never bothered making a detailed list of who went where. They never even, as far as I know, coordinated their lists of people asking for assistance with the missing persons lists.
Anyway, sorry to ramble on. This story was so poorly reported that people have all kinds of misunderstandings of what was happening.
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