Federal officials are urging Florida and other states that accepted Hurricane Katrina evacuees to help locate about 2,000 registered sex offenders who fled the Gulf region and may have vanished from legally required tracking.

But a misunderstanding by Florida law-enforcement officials could delay that search in the Sunshine State, increasing the possibility that those offenders could strike again.

In November, the federal Administration for Children and Families compared Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi's sex offender registries with a Federal Emergency Management Agency database of evacuees who applied for disaster assistance. More than 2,000 matches came back.

That prompted both agencies to develop a system for law-enforcement agencies to find registered sex offenders who are receiving disaster assistance in their jurisdictions. Using that information, law-enforcement officers could check whether those offenders had registered their new addresses as required by law.

"I am greatly concerned that known sex offenders who may have relocated to your state may take advantage of their anonymity and harm children once again," Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, wrote in a Nov. 28 letter to Bush.

The Nov. 28 attachment said that law-enforcement agencies, in their requests, must provide a list of people that they are interested in. But FDLE asked FEMA for ". . . a listing of those persons who have registered as sex offenders in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and any other affected state who have relocated to a Florida residence as a result of hurricane evacuation."

Berlinger did not immediately return a follow-up, after-hours telephone call to his office, while FEMA's public affairs office in Washington, D.C., did not return a telephone message left late Friday afternoon.

While the mix-up could delay Florida's search, the state ironically was among the first to consider comparing sex offender and disaster assistance databases following Katrina. FDLE officials discussed that possibility as far back as mid-September, according to an internal e-mail obtained by The Herald.

"The Commissioner has been in discussion with Louisiana and has agreed that we (FDLE) would see what we could do to help LA and MS track down some of the sex preds that evacuated due to the storm," Ken Tucker, an FDLE assistant commissioner, wrote in a Sept. 19 e-mail to E. J. Piccolo, special agent in charge of FDLE's Fort Myers region.

"The thought was that we could run the names from their sex pred lists against the FEMA database for Katrina storm victims. We have not had much luck from this end and I also have the FBI reaching out to see what they can do."

The Administration for Children and Families also encountered similar delays, primarily related to privacy issues, spokeswoman Jane Norris said. FEMA contends that the names of people applying for disaster assistance are confidential under federal law, a position several media outlets have challenged in court.

"We worked with FEMA for quite some time," Norris said. "There were processes that we had to go through in order to make this happen. Just because FEMA had the database didn't mean that it could be immediately shared, because of the privacy issues."

Paula Stitz, manager of Arkansas' sex offender registry, said she did not know of a state-led initiative to gain access to FEMA records. However, she said, local law enforcement officials had sought information from the federal disaster agency.

"It makes my hair stand on end," she said. "I really believe that registering sex offenders and notifying communities about their whereabouts is important. I think it works. If they can fall through the crack, they will jump through that crack and try to disappear."

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