Communication for the refugees of Hurricane Katrina must be a horrendously difficult affair - especially for those without cell phones. If regulations were relaxed, Voice over Internet technology could allow all affected people to recieve and send calls and messages using their regular phone numbers. This would mean reassigning the phone numbers from destroyed phones to online delivery. The major challenge would be providing refugee centres with enough computers with high speed Internet access.
Stuart Henshall and Tom Evslin elaborate further. Great kudos to them and others thinking about how tech can be used to help in this great disaster.