Some of Ike's missing may have washed away

In Galveston County, where about 15,000 residents stayed behind, officials did not have an exact number of missing residents. The Red Cross is helping track down the missing by setting up registries at shelters and sending workers on welfare checks, Yarbrough said.

At Galveston's emergency management center, 12 phone lines rang constantly with calls from people trying to find relatives. As the calls came in, the city's beach patrol would go to the homes and check.

Sometimes, the searches end in relief. The Red Cross quickly found an elderly Galveston couple reported missing Wednesday morning by relatives in Wyoming, Yarbrough said.

Echoes of Katrina's chaos
The search echoes the chaos following Katrina in 2005, when bodies were turning up more than a year after the storm as ruined homes were dismantled and families returned after months away. Katrina killed more than 1,600 people.

In that storm, there was no way to track people who left the city. The situation worsened when more than 100,000 New Orleanians who took refuge in Houston had to scatter again a few weeks later for Hurricane Rita.

Authorities opened a center in Baton Rouge, La., to take reports of people who were missing. And just as Ike survivors are doing now, volunteers there turned into amateur detectives — digging through Web sites that sprouted for missing families and calling nursing homes and hospitals.

The center for the missing closed nearly a year after Katrina, when authorities said they had finally exhausted leads.

Brownsville resident Amy Woodside has posted several messages online trying to track down friends who may have succumbed to Ike.

"I'm worried about everybody who is still unaccounted for," she said. "We may never find some of them."

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