Fugitive squads are combing Texas and other states to track down registered sex offenders and violent felons who evacuated from hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, using information that proved troublesome to get.

Authorities have been trying to locate sex offenders and felons with recently acquired lists of evacuees from the Federal Emergency Management Agency along with records from Louisiana that were almost destroyed.

"For sexual predators, this is their perfect storm when they can disappear with no supervision," said Madeline McClure, director of the Dallas-based Texas Association for the Protection of Children. "One pedophile can create 350 victims in their lifetime. The worst part is we don't know where they all are."

Texas prison officials realized they needed to first know who the registered sex offenders were. So John Moriarty, inspector general of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, contacted his longtime friend John Clark, a U.S. Marshals Service supervisor who was helping police in New Orleans.

But to retrieve the records from the flooded headquarters of the New Orleans Police Department, Clark, a team of armed marshals and National Guard troops had to use a 5-ton military truck.

"It was stinking, wet, moldy about as foul as you can imagine," Clark said. "We physically manhandled the file cabinets down a stairwell and into the trucks. We took the computers that had the (sex offender) databases on them hard-drives, keyboards, monitors, everything . . . We moved them about three miles under guard.

After decontaminating the equipment, officials quickly downloaded the database and sent the information overnight to officials in Texas, Alabama and other states with Katrina evacuees.

In Texas, officials hoped to use the Louisiana data with federal records to track where sex offenders were now staying. But even though FEMA has a database of people who registered for federal assistance after Hurricane Katrina stuck in late August, its officials were concerned that federal privacy laws prevented them from sharing some of the information. After weeks of haggling over the records, Texas officials received the data slightly more than a week ago.

While officials have reported arresting some sex offenders for new crimes or for failing to register in Texas, it's unclear how many have been located so far. Police in Richardson arrested one registered sex offender from New Orleans who they suspect molested an 8-year-old girl. In Houston, police charged a Katrina evacuee with breaking into a motel, exposing himself to a girl and trying to sexually assault an adult.

Authorities have found that some offenders returned to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Others remain missing even though they have registered in states where they relocated to, said Justin Vickers, a fugitive task force coordinator in New Orleans for the U.S. Marshals Service.

Earlier this month, Louisiana authorities said 205 of 246 New Orleans-area registered sex offenders who evacuated to other states had been located. Arrest warrants were issued for the remaining 41. But the Texas Department of Public Safety has said 373 Louisiana sex offenders were believed to be in Texas, along with 255 others with warrants for their arrest.

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