Alum's voice-mail service lets Katrina victims connect

An estimated one million people are still looking for loved ones in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A new service founded by Dan Schoeffler '81 and supported by many University alumni offers new hope that they can reconnect.

The service, Contact Loved Ones (CLO), provides a toll-free number that hurricane victims can call to leave messages with their new contact information. Separated friends and family can then call the service and retrieve these messages using the old phone number of the person they are trying to reach.

For callers like Penny — who has granted permission to publish her first name alongside a transcript of her message in the hope of increasing her chance of reunion — the calls are a virtual conversation with the missing.

"Tim and Wanda, this is Penny [...]. I wake up every morning thinking of you and hoping that you're safe," one message transcript reads. "Would you please call me or email me and let me know that you're OK? [...] You're in my thoughts and prayers. Know that my heart, my home and my arms are open to receive you. I love you very much; I look forward to hearing that you're safe."

Since its launch in early September, CLO has recorded thousands of messages like Penny's.

The service is the brainchild of Schoeffler, who runs an Internet services company in Long Island.

"A lot of the messages that we get are very personal and very emotional, and our sense is that [the users] are getting some therapeutic value out of it, in being able to speak to their loved one that's missing, even if it's only a one-way conversation for the time being," Schoeffler said.

He based CLO on a voice-mail system he developed several years ago. Days after Katrina struck, he realized that his old idea — for which a patent is currently pending — had great potential to help those whom the storm had recently scattered across the country.

This is the first time a service like CLO has been available to disaster victims.

"A lot of the people who were displaced by Katrina either never had computer access or didn't know how to use computers, and probably weren't that familiar with the Internet and doing Google searches," Schoeffler said. "So we wanted to give them a tool that would be useful for them, and just about everyone is familiar with the telephone."

Using Tigernet's alumni discussion groups about Katrina, Schoeffler sent out an email asking for help from within the Princeton community. Six Princetonians from across the country responded, and they are now part of the service's 20-person, all-volunteer staff.

Kenneth Menken '86, CEO of Capelon Internet Solutions in Baltimore, became the service's Chief Technology Officer. Schoeffler first spoke to Menken on the Friday after the hurricane. By the following Wednesday, they had a basic setup.

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In three days, Menken developed CLO's interactive voice response system software. Afterward, in order to have the capacity to handle a large volume of phone calls, Schoeffler and Menken found various phone companies — such as the Level 3 network owned by Howard Susskind '87 — that were willing to donate inbound telephone lines and numbers to CLO.

The service grew quickly. On Sept. 19, the Red Cross introduced CLO into all of their 340 shelters housing Katrina evacuees. At its peak, CLO was handling several hundred calls per day. Currently, Contact Loved Ones receives between 100 and 150 calls per day, though it is prepared to handle 1,000 simultaneous calls.

With so many incoming calls, Schoeffler and his volunteers do not often have time to listen to the messages, nor do they track how many people their service has successfully reunited.

One successful reunion that they do have on record is that of a 72-year-old woman and her dog, which saved her life by waking her with his barking when floodwaters began to rise in her house. Though the storm separated the woman and her pet, another woman later found the dog and left a message with CLO for his former owner.

Matching pets with their owners has been an often-overlooked problem after Katrina. CLO has been a valuable resource to organizations such as No Animal Left Behind, which are trying to match pets with their owners. Currently, tens of thousands of pets have been left in shelters or trapped in homes as a result of Katrina. Some are being put down because authorities cannot find the owners.

In the future, Schoeffler hopes to form a longterm partnership with the Red Cross. He also envisions CLO as a potential international resource. He's currently looking into working with an aid group to help victims of the earthquake in Pakistan.

"Primarily, I would like to see it be widely known and available to meet the emergencies that might arise in any country around the world," Schoeffler said.