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

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


Source: Phuket Tsunami Disaster Forum

CONTACT: Andreas Hoistad of the Phuket Tsunami Disaster Forum,
+47-915-97500, or ahoistad@yahoo.com

Web site: http://www.p-h-u-k-e-t.com/


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