Now’s a little late to rethink how Telecoms could respond to the Katrina crisis. Still...

Imagine that your phone is under 20 feet of water. The number doesn’t work. You are displaced (refugee apparently is a bad term) and split from your family and other loved ones. Your neighbors of years went in a thousand different directions. You probably don’t have an email for them and lack a mobile number. There was a neighborhood watch, but the list of numbers is now underwater. Yet on the Internet the White Pages and Google remind one of phone numbers and old addresses. It's too bad they don't connect anymore.

The problem is:

• Not only is the neighborhood wrecked, one of the easiest ways to reconnect people, the telephone, is not available.
• How does the child connect with their mother? Before it is too late?
• How can someone act as a point person for someone’s old home line and inquiries? (e.g., call forward)
• How many have an IM system or softphone? Very few. Location, as we know, doesn't matter on the Internet.
• Many of those worst off don't even have a mobile.

Is it too much to ask Bell South to:

• Let displaced account holders log in and claim their accounts (phone numbers) via the Internet. What's happening at the Astrodome?
• Offer every subscriber in the devastated area a free soft phone with voice mail that replicates their old home number? Softphones that would do the job are available. If the numbers were transferable then Skype could probably scale a solution in just hours rather than weeks.
• Drop the fee until the home line is up and running again?
• Enable voice messages via e-mail if required.
• Enable call forwarding if appropriate.
• Provide copies of old phone bills? Help people reconnect with old friends, families, schools, employers, banks.

Or will they:

• Just keep the bills running
• Fail to use their imaginations.

We have the technology and even short term will power to change all this radically. There’s an opportunist's potential to see a VoIP solution and to introduce it. The sense of loss could be reduced and many people could be put more at ease with voice mail and call forwarding options. Let New Orleans residents use their hometown numbers everywhere.