If everything goes according to projections, Thursday, we will be moving out of Orient Lodge, where I’ve lived for over fifteen years to a house in Woodbridge, CT. If everything goes according to current projections, Hurricane Dean will make U.S. landfall on Thursday. Two years ago on August 23 is the day that Tropical Depression Twelve formed. Tropical Depression Twelve later formed into Hurricane Katrina the gulf coast still hasn’t recovered.

Last Monday, I participated in an online conference talking about DeanSpace. This was an effort by various open source programmers to develop websites with social networking tools to help with Gov. Dean’s Presidential campaign. It was an idealistic group that believed that by working together with our own set of skills we could make a difference. After the election, DeanSpace morphed into CivicSpace, and some of the activists joined up with a new project, The Katrina PeopleFinder Project. Its goal was to create a central repository of information about people missing as a result of Hurricane Katrina.

In September, 2005, Ben Smilowitz “contacted the Red Cross to volunteer and was sent to Gulfport, Mississippi where he managed a Client Service Center from mid-September until early October. While his site provided as much as $20 million in 20 days to nearly 20,000 households, the actual support each household received was minimal.”

As a result of his experience, he formed the Disaster Accountability Project to monitor “the public accountability of the US disaster response system”.

Ben describes his effort as follows,

While in Mississippi, I was shocked by the number of gaps in disaster relief services. I tried calling political and media contacts in Washington and remember wishing there was a group or hotline I could call to report the critical gaps in services at the site that I was managing. The media was trying its hardest to report gaps in services and when they did, they were often addressed faster than those that went unreported.

The Disaster Accountability Project is seeking to fill that important function.

Is this a project that those involved with the Katrina PeopleFinder Project will get involved with? I hope so. This hurricane season, let’s be prepared ahead of time. As Hurricane Dean, already a category four storm, heads into the gulf please sign up with the Disaster Accountability Project.