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www.p-h-u-k-e-t.com Has Served Its Purpose After the Tsunami; Site Has Served Millions of Users Posting More Than 15,000 Messages
OSLO, Norway, Jan. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- On December 26th
2004 when the tsunami hit Asia two Phuket-based men took
the initiative to establish a website so that relatives
overseas could search for information about family and
friends missing in Thailand. American Mike Cegielski and
Englishman Steve White started working on creating the
Phuket Tsunami Disaster Forum. Steve, who runs the local
web hosting company 3ix.org in Phuket, hosted the
website on his servers.
Hours after announcing the service it spread by word of
mouth and through the media and the load was more than
the servers could handle. People were desperate for
information and turned to the Internet and governments
overseas who were paralyzed and offered no official
source of information.
With the enormous traffic to the website, Steve made
contact with Leif Hellstrom from Sweden and Andreas
Hoistad from Norway. They provided computer resources to
handle the enormous load the website experienced. During
the first week the forum constantly had 3 - 4000
simultaneous users online.
In 10 days the site had millions of unique visitors and
a total of 15,000 messages were posted in the forum.
As time went by the success stories started to come;
stories of relatives who had been able to establish
contact with their family or friends through the forum,
of relatives who were able to locate the body of their
relative.
The forum had served a purpose.
This private initiative came quick in a time where
official authorities and international aid organizations
where unprepared and unable to respond to the need for
information across the Internet. Thai authorities and
hospitals continuously posted enormous amounts of
information in Thai or English on dozens of different
websites. Now we hope that we can refer all those
affected by this disaster to the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) as they are getting up and
running with their database. Governments still seem to
be ignoring this need worldwide.
This initiative, along with many similar initiatives,
shows the power of the Internet. Thousands, or millions,
of people have put their time and effort into trying to
help those affected by this tragedy. The mass of
information that has been made available through
hospitals, media and other websites has been reviewed
and people have searched for information for each other.
And it gave results.
Finally, having worked with this for the last 1 1/2
weeks we would
strongly recommend that all the volunteers out there
trying with their best efforts to assist in the process
of identifying all the bodies of the unidentified
victims leave this work to local authorities or the Red
Cross.
This work needs to be led by professionals and this work
can be very distressful. We will also strongly warn
against publishing images of deceased victims on the
Internet as it might have dramatic impacts on relatives,
innocent kids surfing the net and others.
After careful consideration we have now decided to
shutdown the forum. We believe it has served its purpose
and it is time for the professionals to do their job.
To all those that lost someone in the Tsunami: Our
thoughts and prayers are with you in this time of crisis.
We hope we have been of help to you.
CONTACT: Andreas Hoistad of the Phuket Tsunami Disaster
Forum,
+47-915-97500, or ahoistad@yahoo.com
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Steve White, Thailand
Leif Hellström, Sweden
Andreas Hoistad, Norway
