By Kelly Morgan,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – There is no single Web site or information line where news on Hurricane Katrina survivors can be found, as Dean Libby has discovered this week.

While Libby and his siblings have spent days searching for a way to contact their mother, who has not been heard from since Monday, they have found that many Web sites listing missing persons or survivors do not seem to be connected. Calls to relief agencies are equally frustrating.

“I was on hold yesterday, no exaggeration, over an hour,” Anita Lewis said Friday. “I was on hold waiting to speak to someone in the Red Cross.”

When Lewis got through, she was connected to a woman who said she would pass word along that the family was looking for news on Dorathy Cassidy – Lewis, Libby and Russell Small’s mother.

Still, there was no guarantee Cassidy would ever get the message. Lewis has not been able to reach a live voice at any other relief organization.

Part of the problem, said Douglas Hoyt, senior executive director of the United Valley Chapter of the American Red Cross, is that there are no direct communication links between the long list of relief and emergency agencies that respond to disasters like Katrina.

Even within the Red Cross alone, Hoyt said, “there is no Big Brother computer system, so to speak.” While the Red Cross takes the names of people entering their shelters, that information is not immediately funneled to some central computer that can spit out lists of survivors on command.

Some major Web sites providing links to message boards with lists of missing persons and survivors, as well as other information about Katrina, include:

• CNN’s help center at www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2005/katrina/help.center/

• The Times-Picayune’s hurricane center at www.nola.com/hurricane/katrina/

• MSNBC’s site, “Looking For..,” at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9159961/

• The American Red Cross site at www.redcross.org

• The Federal Emergency Management Agency Web site at www.fema.gov/

Copy the Story Link