Online Becomes a Frail Lifeline for the Stranded

An Atlanta doctor struggling to find help for his in-laws, who he last heard had been stranded with 300 others on the third floor of St. Augustine High School. A hospital visitor pleading for relief for 2,000 patients, doctors, nurses and others crammed into Memorial Medical Center with little food or water to spare. And from a woman in Connecticut, a message on behalf of her 92-year-old grandmother that could have applied to one and all: “Please send someone to rescue them.”

Internet message boards for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and other Southern news outlets have been jammed with messages from victims of Hurricane Katrina. Many are from people stranded in homes and businesses, desperately looking for help. Others are from relatives across the country, aching to know how, or whether, their loved ones survived the tempest.

By 10 p.m. CDT Wednesday, visitors had posted 3,136 messages on the electronic “Missing” page for the website (www.nola.com) affiliated with the Times-Picayune. Fewer than 40 people had placed responses on a tandem Web page, titled “I’m Okay.”

With the paucity of responses, the missives took on the quality of notes placed in bottles and cast into a vast and unforgiving ocean. Yet the postings gave the senders reason to hope and to feel they hadn’t sat idly by while their loved ones suffered.

“I felt at least I was doing something, you know? I don’t know if I will get any feedback, but I am hopeful,” said Pam Manuel of northern Louisiana, who posted a message for an 84-year-old relative, left alone to an unknown fate 250 miles away in Metairie. “If we could, we would drive down there, but we can’t. Our hands are tied, so this is all we could do.”

One of the most disturbing Internet postings came from Paul Quigley, an activist attorney who teaches at Loyola University in New Orleans and who wrote about being stranded at the city’s Memorial Medical Center, where his wife works, with at least 1,200 other people.

“I am giving you this update,” Quigley wrote late Tuesday, “because we may have no electricity before long. Once the water hits the first floor, the computers, the e-mail, all intercoms and all internal communication inside the hospital will cease.”

Only about 100 of those stranded had caught helicopters out.

“They are estimating that it may take several days to evacuate these people -- water, electricity, food, security all will be gone by then,” Quigley went on. “Please help by notifying the press and the government.”

Steven Campanini, a spokesman for Tenet Healthcare Corp., which operates the hospital, said the company had learned that the number stranded at the 317-bed facility Wednesday morning was actually 2,000, including 150 patients.

He said the healthcare giant had conflicting information about government efforts to evacuate the hospital.

The company itself had begun to coordinate an airlift to move out the patients, staffers and neighbors who took refuge there as floodwaters advanced.

“We are doing everything we can,” Campanini said, “and dedicating the resources of this company and our contacts at the federal, state and local levels to safely remove the patients and employees and physicians and others who are inside the hospital as quickly as possible.”

Campanini conceded that “it’s a very, very difficult situation to be inside a hospital with 2,000 people and trying to maintain order.”

But he added that the lack of consistent phone communication with the hospital or with New Orleans authorities made it unclear what the healthcare company would find when rescue efforts continue.

“There is a possibility that when we get there come morning, there could be another agency that got there and did an evacuation,” Campanini said.

The postings at the newspaper website may not have brought immediate relief at the hospital, but they stirred one Houston woman to action.

Kimberly Williams, a 21-year-old mortgage company employee, read postings by Quigley and others and agreed with her boyfriend that they had to do something to help. When New Orleans refugees arrive at Houston’s Astrodome, she and her boyfriend plan to offer to house the neediest at his three-bedroom home.

Andrea Silvers of Vernon, Conn., also tried to bridge the unknown with a message inquiring about her grandmother Blanche Guilford, 92. The last she heard before the storm, Silvers’ aunt and uncle hoped to protect Guilford by pushing her in her wheelchair into a closet -- presumably away from glass and flying debris.

Silvers’ posting on the Picayune website had received no response by late Wednesday, and New Orleans harbor police told her that authorities were too short-handed to check out every missing-person complaint. “There is just no way to know whether or not she is OK,” Silvers said, her voice quavering.

Atlanta Dr. LeRoy Graham had posted his message Wednesday afternoon pleading “Please Help!” on behalf of his mother and father-in-law, who had evacuated to the high school near Dillard University.

Graham said he had not gotten any response by Wednesday.

Like many of the others, Graham said the act of searching had proven a reward in itself. “We have been blessed to get this far,” he wrote in an e-mail, “and truly believed they have [been], or shortly will be, rescued.”