The number of volunteers
When I arrived (and finally figured out where to go), my orientation class of volunteers was between 200 and 300 people. At the same time as our class, the staging area was filled with roughly 500 people receiving job assignments. I figured with the holiday, the number of volunteers would either be exceptionally low or exceptional high. The response was definitely the latter. My "class" of volunteers were made up of every class, color and political bent (judging from the attire, hats and conversations).

The meeting of immediate needs
The facility is definitely meeting the needs of the displaced. Everyone has received clean clothing and is receiving 3 meals per day. Yes, the Astrodome smells bad but anyone who ever attended an Oilers or Astros game there in years past would definitely recognize the smell. It smells like 'dome. The facility is not a prison - residents are free to go outside or travel from facility to facility. They can also walk to nearby stores and restaurants.

The behavior of the evacuees
I spent my day with my computer trying to help people from the inside and the outside locate their loved ones. Not once did anyone speak rudely to me or become impatient. Every single person I encountered was well behaved and gracious. Even though the situation is extremely difficult and issues with the organization of the shelter are many, the people are taking things in stride. It is now believed that many of the rumors coming out of the Superdome were untruths and exaggerations and I have to say that I agree. Granted, these people are now in a situation where their basic needs are being met but they are still homeless and separated from family and friends, but I was amazed at how they have responded to the devastation of this tragedy.

Politics As Usual
Harry S. Truman once said "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." Unfortunately, the reverse axiom is a testament to organizational bureaucracy. It seemed like every organizational unit is scrambling for the resources to do their job. My group was people with their own Wi-Fi laptops helping perform people searches. We had a team in the Reliant Center which was housing roughly 5000 people and were working to get a team in the Astrodome (housing 12-15k). The organizers finally had to 'borrow' tables from a conference room scheduled for FEMA meetings. There were several wireless connections in the dome but only one was solid. However our group was not allowed to use the good one because it was reserved for a group of programmers working on something (which I hope is a master list of people and their locations). I'm not implying that their work is unimportant; but adding 15 people performing web-based searches was not going to crimp their bandwidth.

Aside from food distribution like clockwork, the rest of the operation is organized chaos. Every organizational group knows its job, and nothing else. Someone delivered a box of cell phones to our group so we could let people call their loved ones as we located them. However, they didn't have any minutes assigned so they were unusable. That issue is more logistics than politics. It takes time to plan for this scale of relief. The need was immediate so planning was a luxury that could not be afforded. I'm not complaining about the relief or the effort - the effort has been incredible but the organization is still not there (and it is so much more difficult to organize an operation already in progress).

Lack of Information
Once the people's basic needs have been met - shelter and food, the next need is information. The Red Cross is doing an incredible job helping people out with the basic needs but their information structure is frustrating. A number of places have set up hurricane people finders and shelter registers. As people were processed coming into Houston, information was taken on a card. Keep in mind that 250k people have been processed in that complex, with most being moved on to other shelters in this city and in others (Dallas and San Antonio). However, that information was not available for people searches. Part of the reason is that the Red Cross maintains information that is required to be kept confidential. I can understand that. However, get the basic information out there even if it is just name and location.

Our short term solution was as people came seeking information to not only help them search but also to register them into a people database. That information was then being given to a Red Cross portal as well as people listings from many other portals (Yahoo, CNN, etc.) daily. The Red Cross is still working on their own database which is not ready for prime time, but they have not endorsed another one or given a dump of the non-private information taken when evacuees were processed. I noticed a news blurb last night where the Red Cross was claiming that their people finder had 75k names in it now...names I helped put in...but the unknown story is that most people in the Reliant complex are not in that system. Some of the names are the people searching for a loved one even if they were not themselves displaced.

Is there a solution? There are several. One is to announce that everyone needs to check in at the computer tables and get registered. Alternatively, the processing data needs to be incorporated into the system. I know there were some shelters that have added everyone to the database because whenever we searched for someone in those shelters we found them. I guess my biggest frustration is that this is what I do professionally. I write software that manages people and receives data from every insurance payor imaginable in every data format imaginable and successfully populates a single database with that information. It is frustrating when you know how to solve a problem but don't have the clout to do it.

Bitter Defeat...
With the information issues we were facing, my guess is 90% of our searches came up blank. Every single failure broke your heart, but the most memorable was a man who had just driven in from Georgia to pick up his two daughters. He simply told me he was here to pick up his girls and dropped two pictures in front of me. Two beautiful girls probably somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. I searched and came up empty, and explained that they were not showing up in my system but that our information is far from complete. His face held an expression which will never be forgotten. He did have some contact with them earlier in the week so he knew there were in Houston and another volunteer offered to take him into the other two shelters so he could search there. I pray he found them.

...and Victory too
Although the successes were very few, they were all the more sweet. I saw several instances where a volunteer would locate the phone number of a family member and pull their own cell phone out of their pocket and hand it to the person across the table from them (because the phones we were given were worthless). One family was trying to locate another family member we helped identify that they were in one of the three complexes being used (Astrodome, Reliant Center, Reliant Arena). We directed them to the paging center for the Reliant Center (where we were working at the time) and about 15 minutes later we heard a bunch of whooping and screaming. We looked over and saw that they had been reunited with their the woman they were seeking. Sometimes even victory was difficult - like trying to explain to someone that their brother or child was safe but had been moved to a shelter in Arlington, TX (5 hours away).

Incredible Volunteer Force
Despite all the adversity and the heartbreaking situation, the volunteer force was incredible. Everyone I encountered with a volunteer wristband was focused and worked hard. Everyone was frustrated with the roadblocks all around but every interaction I witnessed with evacuees by a volunteer was surrounded by an attitude of servanthood. It was amazing how attached you got to the people you worked with after just a few hours together in this environment. If you spent an hour working beside someone, they were a friend and they remembered you when you ran into them later - and asked when you were coming back.