Disaster Web Sites Overloaded with Queries About Loved Ones

Josh Gohlke
The Record—Bergen County, New Jersey

September 17, 2001

The owners of a tourism Web site in the U.S. Virgin Islands started
the Disaster Message Service six years ago to help people in the
Caribbean communicate after Hurricane Marilyn.

Its popularity
led them to expand as new disasters unfolded worldwide, producing a
proliferation of public message boards grouped under a list of links
on the site's home page: tornado, tsunami, volcano, drought,
earthquake, forest fire, flood.

None of that, it seems, quite prepared the service—www.disasterboard.com—for the electronic deluge that started Tuesday and hasn't stopped yet.

"The volume has been much larger than any other national disaster we have had message boards for," editor Sophia Aubin said via e-mail. "We were receiving thousands of posts per hour."

After opening an "America Attacked" area dedicated to the terrorism at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the site had to expand from four message boards to twelve. Messages were grouped in new archives every few hours.

After several hours, the site's host told administrators that the messages were taking up too much bandwidth and that the site would be shut down, Aubin said. Once informed of the public-service nature of the site, however, Hostcentric in Houston, Texas, agreed to provide more capacity at no charge, Aubin said.

Far-Flung Postings

Names on the bulletin boards came from places ranging from Hawthorne and Clifton, New Jersey, to Australia and Romania. The Internet became a virtual extension of the roving bands of bereaved relatives and friends in Manhattan, where physical gathering places were established in the days following the attacks.

The echoes of wartime confusion are unavoidable. In fact, Aubin said, the only comparable volume in the site's history was during the war in Kosovo, and that came over an extended period.

The Disaster Message Service was not alone in the inundation. Prodigy, based in Austin, Texas, had posted 8,000 names to its "I'm OK" list (okay.prodigy.net) and recorded two million searches as of Friday, said a spokesman for the company. Two employees were dedicated to maintaining the list full time.

Tuesday's catastrophic events are as prominent on the Internet as in other media, producing the usual collection of news and discussion. But the confusion and uncertainty that followed in New York and the rest of the country particularly fueled the use of message boards and electronic bulletin boards where anyone with a computer and a phone line can post information publicly.

Most common were queries from close relatives or distant friends seeking word of people working or living in Manhattan. From them, the Disaster Message Service and other sites compiled an often-overwhelming catalog of searching and sorrow.

"I know that we parted on bad terms," reads one posting, "but I still care and need to know that you are alive and well."

"She lived alone with her eight-year-old daughter," says another.

And another: "I am looking for my dad. …He has a zigzag scar across the fingers of his right hand. …He has a wife and four kids waiting for him."

"Desperately need information on Colleen."

"Is Kristin Cook safe?"

"I'm looking for my husband. …"

Some are directed by fellow posters to a hospital or Internet list where a name can be found. Many have less luck. "I have left messages but not heard anything from anyone," says one repeat poster. "Thank you."

Some freelancers were unequal to the task. Bill Shunn, a programmer and writer in Queens, New York, started a World Trade Center "check-in registry" on his personal home page, only to find himself ultimately unable to handle the response. Just after midnight Wednesday, he regretfully announced his exit from the business of electronic survivor lists "due to extreme server overload."

Shunn said that with New York phone lines becoming quickly jammed, his check-in grew exponentially out of an exchange of e-mails among concerned friends. He wrote a program to automate it for public use and soon found his little site linked to behemoth portals such as Microsoft's MSN.com.

"I was feeling sort of manic and very focused at the time," Shunn said Friday. "I was writing code very fast, and I was trying to keep up with people writing hate messages.

"The times when I took a break from the computer, I started feeling a lot of grief. I guess the work had been keeping me occupied."

Surge of False Hopes

Like many Internet volunteers, Shunn said he was overpowered by those searching for the missing, even though his site was designed as a survivor list.

The Monmouth County borough of Atlantic Highlands used the municipal Web site (www.ahnj.com/ferry.htm) to log New York City refugees who took the first available ferry and landed there, most "having no idea where they were," said Borough Clerk Dave Palamara.

With help from volunteers, the borough listed more than 1,000 passengers.

"There have been several calls about people who worked with someone whose name is on there," Palamara said. "We got a lot of questions. There's questions from people who probably are not going to get someone home."

A site created by a group of computer-science students at the University of California, Berkeley (safe.millennium.berkeley.edu), addressed those questions with a blanket answer: "Please do not write to us asking for more details on a particular person. I am profoundly sorry that I cannot help you."

The unregulated flow of the Internet was its draw in the chaotic days following the disaster, but it increasingly became a drawback. The Disaster Message Service's editor spent much of her time editing "insensitive, ignorant, and unnecessary posts," she said.

Worse, Shunn found that unverified claims may have given families false hope. "I think there was a time for these grassroots sites, and that was Tuesday," he said.

The success rate of the Web sites is not easily gauged, but several messages reveal a joyful discovery "Go to the following Web site. Paul is listed as being safe." Administrators were thanked profusely. The solace, though, was often dwarfed by the more frequent alternative.

"It is very difficult to hear from thousands of people who are desperate, lost, sad, and in-need people who only want one thing: to find their sister, their friend, their wife," Aubin said. "Very difficult. It is more difficult to understand when the disaster that is causing their grief is not a natural one."

Copyright 2001 The Record, Bergen County, New Jersey