From a business standpoint, the engineering services firm's offices were inaccessible for about a month after Katrina struck on Aug. 29 and caused devastating flooding the following day. Because its systems were out of reach, URS had to buy new hardware, especially PCs for its end users, Scripter said. The company set up remote offices in Baton Rouge, La., as well as Houston and Austin, and it took URS two weeks after the storm to restore its IT operations.

Now Scripter is back in New Orleans, working to make certain that the company could recover from another catastrophic storm within five days. He said his staff has installed a storage-area network in New Orleans and is investigating how to mirror the data on the SAN to an off-site location in another state. URS is also installing a system that will replicate separate Oracle databases used in 3-D engineering applications to remote locations. "We're trying to get a lot of this stuff in place by June 1," Scripter said.

Familiar Ground

Larry Mayo, vice president of information technologies at Keesler Federal Credit Union in Biloxi, Miss., is working under the same deadline.

Keesler's headquarters building lost its roof and most of its windows to Katrina, but the credit union's data center was spared because it was located between two cement floors in the middle of the building, Mayo said. A generator worked throughout the seven days that the company was without electricity, and Mayo took steps to activate Keesler's disaster recovery hot site in Scottsdale, Ariz.