I wouldn’t have even been reunited with my other family here in Georgia if it wasn’t for that.”ĭue to NCMEC’s efforts in the aftermath of Katrina, Congress later mandated the establishment of the National Emergency Child Locator Center (NECLC), which NCMEC operates during Presidentially declared disasters at the request of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But you just have to look at the bigger picture and know that there’s always a light at the end of that tunnel. “With that hurricane, it did affect so many lives and separate so many families. Calvin’s great-grandmother was also found safe after the evacuation.Īlthough it was a confusing and life-altering experience, Calvin has been able to think of his displacement after Katrina as having an overall positive impact on his life. My picture was all over the news, flashing everywhere constantly, all throughout the day.”Īfter Calvin was located by the Houston Police and Team Adam, NCMEC worked with his family in Georgia to make arrangements to get him there safely. I didn’t know the entire time that there was a missing persons report out for me. “I was in Houston and in school there for about a week before an officer came up to me in school, during lunch period and asked, ‘Are you Calvin?’ and I said, ‘Yes sir I am.’ He explained to me that my grandparents here in Georgia had been looking for me. Gice’s side, and she’d been taking care of him in Texas. That’s when they made the call to NCMEC to report him missing.Ī tip had come in to NCMEC saying that Calvin had left Louisiana by Mrs. They had no idea where their grandson was and knew that Louisiana was being hit hard by the Hurricane. Meanwhile, Calvin’s grandparents in Georgia were worried sick. But they had no way to let Calvin’s family know what had happened. The good news was Gice and Calvin made it safely to Houston, Texas to stay with Gice’s family just as Katrina made landfall. When Calvin’s grandmother realized there wasn’t room for them both in the same van, she made arrangements for Calvin to leave with his preschool teacher, Mrs. It was a chaotic scene as hundreds of families were trying to make it to safety. In an example of that scenario, Calvin and his great-grandmother were separated as evacuation vans filled up leaving Louisiana. “There had been no way to keep track of who was getting on which bus.” “A lot of families got on separate buses assuming they were all going to the same place, but they weren’t,” said Brook Schaub, a Team Adam consultant who was helping find children after Katrina. After Hurricane Katrina, Team Adam was on the ground in Louisiana and Texas, searching for missing kids. The group is named for Adam Walsh, a six-year-old boy who went missing in 1984 and was later discovered deceased, prompting his father, John Walsh, to help establish NCMEC. A major force behind those resolutions were the members of NCMEC’s Team Adam, a group of retired police officer volunteers who are deployed in cases of critically missing children. In Calvin’s hometown of New Orleans, over 70% of the city was flooded by the end of Katrina’s eight-day tiradeĭuring the aftermath of Katrina, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) helped resolve 5,192 missing child cases of children displaced because of the storm. It’s estimated that over 1,800 perished in the storm and millions more were left homeless all across the Gulf Coast. ![]() Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest hurricanes to ever hit the United States.
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