346,521 records as of 9/11/2005 10:43 AM

This is our effort in numbers. On the 4th the technology went up. By the 6th, the majority of unstructured data was in the database (craigslist, nola.com, etc.) through thousands of volunteer data entry folks and "scrapes" of Gluf Coast News, IDRC, MSNBC and other structured sources were ready to go into the database, but not there yet.

Unfortunately, it took another couple of days working through technology issues for stuctured data to be bulk loaded into the PeopleFinder database and today we have the comprehensive database we wanted to have up by the 7th.

People ask me where survivors should search. I tell them (1) Yahoo People Finder (good name, I approve) because it constantly is crawling the various boards and resources. (2) Katrina Safe becuase it is destined to be the "official" repository. (3) Katrinalist.net since we have some records that Yahoo doesn't and our data is in a more structured format, allowing potentially better matches with partial information.

We are doing this becuase survivors need to find their loved ones now. Eventually, the technology instrastructure will exist, hopefully based on what we've done here, to make quick massive reaction a plan rather than a struggle that requires Yahoo to fend 40 engineers out to Houston and Microsoft to have engineering teams working around the clock in Houston, or thousands of Katrina PeopleFinder Project volunteers work straight through the holiday weekend.