In the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, one key deficiency exposed in emergency planning and management was the lack of a plan to address reuniting children with their parents or legal guardians. But the hope is that won’t be highlighted as an issue in the future: A recently released framework — developed by FEMA, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, American Red Cross and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) — aims to help prepare agencies to better address child reunification during emergencies and events.
“Katrina obviously taught many emergency management professionals a lot about various facets of emergency management,” said Sharon Hawa, program manager of emergency communications at NCMEC. The document that describes the framework, Post-Disaster Reunification of Children: A Nationwide Approach (PDF), is designed to provide state and local jurisdictions, as well as others, a template to build a plan that suits their specific needs.
“It is meant to be a framework that will provide local jurisdictions and states a scalable document with the resources they would need and the first steps to build their own local child reunification plan,” Hawa said. “It really was meant to encourage local jurisdictions to take that part of reunification as a priority and to write plans around it, but not feel overwhelmed by the fact that there is yet another plan they have to write.”
The document notes that it was created “to support the overall reunification processes and procedures by establishing a fundamental baseline, assisting in identifying the role of lead and supporting agencies and organizations, and serving as a tool to enhance reunification elements of existent emergency preparedness plans and/or help guide the development of new all-hazard reunification plan elements and procedures.”
No one would argue about the importance of including children and families in emergency management plans — but it does add a lot for agencies and their planners to consider. “I think people find it overwhelming when they hear that there is a document that gives them everything they need to help them start thinking about or planning or even just start the discussion on reunification,” Hawa said.
As emergency management agencies set their plans, they should involve hospitals in the process, added Sarita Chung, director of disaster preparedness at Boston Children’s Hospital’s Division of Emergency Medicine.
“As we set up the framework, we also need to look at the medical side of it, recognizing that the medical side may have children or families that are displaced and will need to also participate in that reunification,” she said.
Law Enforcement Is Overwhelmed
A key concern amid a major disaster such as hurricanes Katrina and Rita is how resources are allocated.
“Law enforcement worry about public safety and emergency management are worried about human services, sheltering and feeding, and most of the time that reunification piece goes untouched,” Hawa said. “Most of the time, we’re lucky because reunification is one of the things that does sort itself within 24 to 48 hours, but when you are talking about children, 24 to 48 hours can add a whole host of problems that we don’t want to see happen. So the faster reunification of children can happen, the better.”
With Hurricane Katrina, for example, it took more than seven months before the final reunification case was closed. More than 5,000 children were separated because of that disaster.
And during an emergency, NCMEC is available to help state and local jurisdictions, something that’s highlighted in the framework document.
“We try to talk to state and local emergency management professionals and law enforcement to let them know we have resources that are no cost to states, can help them with that reunification of children, to take local burden off and help them focus on other tasks,” Hawa said. “The reunification piece will be left to people who have the ability, the time and the expertise to do it. Really, it’s just about a simple request.”
But it’s not just about helping state emergency management staff. After a disaster, numerous agencies and organizations — 911 call centers, hospitals, nonprofits — are inundated with calls about missing people. “They get probably hundreds, if not thousands, of phone calls if it is a larger-scale disaster,” said Hawa. “It inundates the local service and creates a block of phone calls that might need to get through. And it creates an overwhelming amount of work for that local staff.”
During Katrina, at the request of the Department of Justice, NCMEC set up a call center in its Alexandria, Va., headquarters where all calls related to child reunification were routed to. Hawa said NCMEC was able to take the calls and leads about children and work directly with various partners and its own workforce to help expedite the process of reuniting children with their parents or guardians. This included a group of retired law enforcement professionals, known as Team Adam, that has experience in search and rescue, homicide investigations and missing children cases — so its members understand the complexities related to these situations.
“Their expertise in this area can provide additional resources to a local jurisdiction that has been impacted by a disaster, that doesn’t have a reunification plan in place,” Hawa said. However, she stressed that Team Adam is meant to supplement local law enforcement and emergency management personnel, rather than replace them.
Post-Katrina Changes
NCMEC’s call center worked so well during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that it led to the establishment, at the direction of Congress through the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, of the National Emergency Child Locator Center, which is located in Florida.
“On a day-to-day basis, it supplements our 24/7 call center in Virginia, but during a disaster, it would stand up solely for that disaster at the request of the state to manage all child reunification calls,” Hawa said. Just as redundancy is important to all response agencies, NCMEC has plans in place in the event that the call center operations need to expand or relocate. Hawa said there are several facilities located throughout the U.S. that could be used for this purpose.
Another tool developed by NCMEC that launched last June is the Unaccompanied Minors Registry, something anyone who comes in contact with an unaccompanied minor can access via a smartphone, tablet or computer. It asks a few questions about the child and the user of the registry.
“If you happen to be the one who finds the child, but you hand the child over to law enforcement, a Red Cross shelter worker or whatever the case may be, we ask for information about where this child is now, who has protective custody of this child at this moment and then that information goes directly to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” Hawa said. “We will work to verify the information and to follow up and ask if they had a reunification either by working directly with law enforcement or with our own resources on the ground.”
One of the post-Katrina lessons that helped shape the registry was the importance of being able to upload photos and video to the system.
“People who have a smartphone oftentimes can take photos or video, and we noticed that during Katrina photos were a way of reunifying a child with family,” Hawa said. “It’s an important element to include.”
Users can upload a photo of the child to the system, which helps NCMEC create posters and spread the information in communities.
Next Steps
While not necessarily a living document that will be updated, the framework will receive addendums as new lessons are learned from future events, though there are still some areas that need to be addressed from the post-Katrina fallout.
One addendum highlighted by Hawa was how to deal with reunification when children come from broken homes or are under the legal guardianship of someone other than their birth parents. During Katrina, this became an issue because court records that would identify the child’s legal guardian were destroyed by flooding, leaving the possibility for children to be reunited with the wrong party.
Hawa recalled concerns from that time, where parents who didn’t have custody of their children, who may have been living with grandparents, for example, suddenly claimed the kids for financial gain. She said this is a key issue that will be addressed by future additions to the document.
Technology could also play a greater role in the reunification process, Chung said, though more research on this is needed. She noted a pilot project conducted at Boston Children’s Hospital that used computers to extract information — such as age, gender, hair color, eye color and skin color — about an individual from photographs to help match children to information in various databases.
“Our pilot program was pretty successful,” Chung said. “We are looking for more funding to develop it.”
