Last week, Senator Barack Obama introduced a bill called the National Emergency Family Locator Act that would help families more easily locate the Katrina evacuees. As you’ve no doubt read (see this story in the Washington Post:
Duplication Rife in Online Relief Efforts), there are several, disparate, uncoordinated repositories of such info on the Web now. Survivors and worried families have to comb through databases from the Red Cross, Craigslist, Lycos, and many others hoping to find word of a loved one.
I have received dozens of calls to my offices in Illinois from constituents asking my caseworkers to help them locate their relatives lost in the Gulf Coast. Greta from Chicago was looking for her Aunt Perra Lee. John from Romeoville was looking for his children and grandchildren in Biloxi. The calls kept coming, but my staff could only point these constituents to various nonprofit organizations doing their best to provide locator services. There was no centralized Federal Government system in place to deal with this issue. Such a system should be in place.
The government must provide these people with a means to let their families know that they are out of harm's way. Various non-profit organizations and news services have done a stellar job at using the Internet to connect displaced people with their families. Our government, through the Department of Homeland Security, should synthesize the best aspects of these services, so that after an emergency, displaced individuals can call one phone number or go to one website, and post their location and condition. Family members and law enforcement officials should be able use this same secure, centralized system to check the status of missing loved ones.
I am introducing a bill--the National Emergency Family Locator System Act that will instruct the Department of Homeland Security to create such a system. I hope that the next time our country experiences a disaster like Katrina, this system will provide worried families with some sense of relief.
I totally understand the motivation for such a database, but is this really something we want the federal government to do? Is it even practical?
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