The storm that devastated New Orleans and killed about 1,300 people also blew apart families and friends like twigs in the wind -- five months on, about 2,500 people remain missing and the trail is going cold.
In the rush by 750,000 families to evacuate when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast last August, relatives split up and scattered across the United States, often then moving several more times, posing unprecedented challenges for government and volunteer search organizations.
Thousands of people have been reunited. But as time drags on, hope is turning to fear that loved ones may never be found, or in some cases don't want to be found or that a few may even have since died.
"Did you forget how much YOU loved your grandmother and how much SHE loved you," an unidentified person wrote last week on one of the many Web sites set up to help Katrina victims search for the missing.
In hiding?
For at least some people, facing debt or other personal problems, the chaos and confusion in the days after the city's levees broke offered a golden opportunity to disappear.
"It's a huge difficulty to try to track these people down," Robert Johannessen, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, told Reuters.
"You have to believe that there are people who used this as an opportunity to go missing."
The Find Family National Call Center, set up to help people search for Katrina missing, listed 2,508 people missing as of the end of January. The actual number could be smaller as some people may have found relatives without informing the center, Johannessen said, but new cases are still coming up -- about 80 just in the past week.
"It's added to as people only today realize that they haven't heard from Aunt Jane," he said.
Search going cold
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children lists 254 children as still missing related to Katrina and Hurricane Rita that blew through the same area weeks later.
A plethora of missing person Web sites sprang up with the best of intentions after the disaster, but that may have hindered the search by drawing people to different groups rather than to a single clearing house.
Some of the bigger, more effective sites have closed in recent weeks, to the frustration of those still searching.
"It's upsetting and aggravating," said Dawn Claro, an Illinois housewife with Volunteers for Katrina Missing. "I guess they are thinking it's just all going to go away."
Claro's group has shrunk to just five members from more than 20 in the immediate aftermath of Katrina.
100 bodies unidentified
The most chilling statistic for those still searching is 100 -- the number of unidentified bodies from the disaster. DNA has been extracted from all of the bodies, Johannessen said, so it can be matched with that of relatives who come forward.
The latest to be identified this way, on Sunday, was Jacqueline Manuel, a 65-year-old woman who had cerebral palsy and diabetes and was airlifted from a road outside New Orleans during the evacuation.
Her family had spent the past five months frantically calling nursing homes around the country, fearing she had become a "Jane Doe" unable to communicate her identity.
Officials at the morgue told her family that Manuel was brought there from a northern Louisiana nursing home on Sept. 25.
"I called almost every state in the United States, and to hear that she was right there all that time is unbelievable," said Dana Clark, Manuel's niece.
