Reunification

I was listening to a recent episode of LeShow, Harry Shearer's comedy/news radio program and he went into one of his regular topics - the situation in New Orleans. For those who don't know, Shearer is a part-time resident of New Orleans, so the Katrina situation impacted him more personally than many of the celebrities who made noise in the initial days and have since gone quiet.

(On a related, important, but tangential note to this post - if you're in a place to catch his film "The Big Uneasy" check it out. I'm looking forward to catching it in Sacramento in March. If you aren't aware, the film looks into issues around the failure of the levees and other flood-protection mechanisms, and the role of the Army Corps of Engineers in creating the disaster. After I've seen it I'll be in more of a position to comment.)

Anyway - what I wanted to talk about is the issue of reunification. On the show, Shearer was commenting on the recently released information from the census and the impact the unplanned evacuation during Katrina had on the population of the city. It's an issue he's spoken about before, the problem of there being thousands, if not tens of thousands, of residents who were evacuated to various miscellaneous locations without much effort to track them, and there now being little or no way to find them.

What this always brings up for me is - who should take the primary role in reunification? What I'm thinking about here is the role that a community, in this case the very vibrant community that makes New Orleans the great city it is, could play in reunification. Using the governmental systems in the initial stages makes perfect sense, but when it's clear that they're not cutting it, which is the case based on Shearer's comments, is it time for the community to take over? There may be websites or other ways to communicate that community members are aware of and non-community members wouldn't know. Additionally, community members would have a much better idea how many people are missing, including if there are any specific groups that need outreach (faith communities, ethnic groups, etc) and other specialized details that "officials" just don't have.

In a lot of ways it reminds me of a project one of my professors in grad school was working on, looking at ways to connect faith communities and local governments for emergency response and preparedness. His idea is that the faith communities know their members and their needs, and the local governments have the resources to help in disasters - by getting together the local governments can help the faith communities when they have members who need assistance that goes beyond what the community can meet.

In the case of reunification, the community could be the group to design the information, and the government (depending on the size of the event, local, state, or Federal) could be the mechanism for getting that information out.

It's just my thoughts, and I haven't done a lot of work or research on the subject so any thoughts or comments would be great.