January 5, 2005

To Those Seeking Help and Giving It, Computer Is a Lifeline

he news hit like the wave, a flood of images and words streaming over every news channel and on the front of every newspaper. But hours after the tsunami battered coastlines in southern Asia, Lisa Bauman, a nurse in Austin, Tex., had heard nothing from her brother and his family, who were visiting Indonesia.

Like thousands of others worried about relatives and friends in this most global of disasters, she turned to the most global of media. She posted notices on half a dozen Web sites, including one on a message board created by the International Committee of the Red Cross: "Please help me find my brother Thomas Bauman Jr., his wife Vivi Gunawan and their two boys ... We have heard no word. Were you on their flight? Or did you see them at the airport?"

She spent hours on the Internet, scanning lists and photos of victims and survivors posted by hospitals and government offices and calling up the online version of The Jakarta Post for more detailed news.

She received consoling messages from strangers but little hard information. Finally, on Thursday night, her mother reached Mr. Bauman by telephone and learned that all in the family were fine.

Experiences like the Baumans' illustrate the Internet's extraordinary reach, but also its limitations.

On dozens of sites - chat rooms and message boards newly created by travel companies, news sites and relief agencies - individuals can enter brief physical descriptions of lost friends and family members, along with a plea for any scrap of information. Many who post are relatives of Western tourists who were traveling in Asia when the tsunami hit. They take to the Web to decipher unfamiliar place names or find maps of tiny beachside towns they know only from postcards. They comb through lists of the dead, posted at government Web sites and updated by the local authorities, or look up foreign hospitals, some of which have posted pictures of Western children whose parents were swept away.

The Internet has also become the main conduit of private donations for what is shaping up to be the biggest international relief effort in decades. By Tuesday, Amazon.com said it had raised more than $14 million by offering its site as a way to donate to the American Red Cross.

About half of the $92 million in donations to the American Red Cross so far have come over the Internet, a spokeswoman said.

Most of the dead were not tourists but residents of Thailand, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka and other places where Internet access is hardly widespread. But even Americans and Europeans using the Internet seemed more likely to find condolences than a loved one: of a dozen people contacted by The New York Times who posted notices seeking missing relatives, none got a reply with useful information.

Esther Dyson, editor of the online journal Release 1.0 and a prominent writer on the Internet's impact, said people should not judge the bulletin boards a failure. They represent an astonishing technological leap beyond what would have been possible in a disaster a decade ago, she said.

"Anyone in the world can put up a bulletin board, and anyone else can search it and find a name," she said. "That's a miracle. The same tools we use to find the best buys on Amazon come into play when we're trying to find out who's alive and who's dead."

Whatever their ultimate value in tracing the missing, the public messages and photographs have turned the Web into a memorial of the catastrophe, marked by diversity and a sense of desperation:

¶"We're looking for our housemate, Pamella Lim, who is an Indonesian national working in Australia. She traveled to Jakarta over Christmas and was going to Medan in late December."

¶"Pastor Ruth Snyder who was working in Indonesia as a missionary. She was doing prison ministries."

¶"I'm looking for my best friend, Lia Schnackenberg. Last time I contacted her she said that she was staying on a bungalow at a beach. I'm not sure where."

¶"I'm looking for information about my friend Siri Nanda who lives in Habaraduwa (near Koggala) and worked as a beach boy near the Koggala Hotel."

The Web site of the Siam View Hotel in Arugam Bay, Sri Lanka, once displayed room descriptions and copies of the restaurant menu. Now it links to a plain-text page offering disaster updates and a list of the local dead and missing.

E-mail and Web sites are valuable for governments and private agencies coordinating logistics after such a disaster, said Paul Meyer, a Washington entrepreneur who has worked on providing technology in crises from West Africa to the Balkans.

In a crisis like the tsunami, "the fundamental problem is that no one's in charge," said Mr. Meyer, chief executive of Voxiva, which was preparing to offer its communications services in the disaster area. Speaking of the Web, he said, "There's a real role for a shared clearinghouse of information."

But he added: "You have to be realistic about the reach of the Internet. There's no cybercafe in the ruined villages of Sumatra."