|
Part 1: The Disaster
Shortly after 6 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 29, Katrina, now a Category 4 storm, made landfall in Louisiana, cutting a broad swath of torn roofs and felled trees. From his hotel room in Memphis, Evanson spoke with Tom Oreck in Houston. Initial reports indicated that corporate headquarters in New Orleans and the company's 375,000-square-foot factory in Long Beach, Miss., had suffered only minor storm damage. And the destruction in New Orleans itself was less extensive than many had feared.
Then CNN broadcast the awful news: The levees were failing. Around 11 a.m., the swollen waters of Lake Pontchartrain, on the city's north side, breached a berm, and New Orleans began to flood. Other sections of the levee gave way as well; and before long, 80% of the city was underwater, deeper than 20 feet in some neighborhoods.
That afternoon, Evanson's cell phone stopped working -- as did the phones for all the company's executives and everyone else in the 504 area code, which was overwhelmed by the emergency volume of calls.
The real disaster had begun. The mayor ordered any remaining residents to evacuate, the Louisiana Superdome filled with refugees, looting flared across dry patches of the city, and the entire infrastructure of a major American city collapsed. A week later, half of New Orleans was still submerged.
Katrina would turn out to be the costliest disaster in American history, walloping a three-state area of the Gulf Coast almost as large as the U.K., with a death toll estimated at more than 1,300 people and damages topping $125 billion.
"I've never seen anything like it," says Tom Oreck. "The level of destruction was mind-numbing."
Oreck's company, of course, had a disaster recovery plan. It was based on the assumption that either company headquarters or its factory located 76 miles away would remain usable. "We figured a storm might take out one or the other of our facilities, but not both," says Oreck.
He was wrong. The hurricane devastated the area surrounding the plant, sweeping homes off their foundations and tossing cars around like toys. The storm tore the Oreck sign off the factory, but the building remained largely intact. Worse, half of Oreck's 1,200 workers were displaced, with many of their homes destroyed.
Moreover, Katrina left the company's IT systems at both headquarters and the factory in tatters. By Wednesday, Oreck's core AS/400 systems -- finance, manufacturing, distribution, call center and order entry/customer service -- were running at IBM's facility in Boulder, Colo. But the data center could not establish communications with headquarters or the factory, where important local area network and PC-based files, such as payroll records, remained stored on servers. Nor could it communicate with vital business partners, such as credit card processors or UPS, or with Oreck's e-commerce or point-of-sale (POS) systems, which were hosted by a New Orleans firm that had been driven from the city and was unable to access its own data center.
All these crucial parts of the company's business were tied together by dedicated T1 lines from the corporate office in New Orleans. And Katrina snapped those lines like twigs. The outage also took down the 800 phone numbers that Oreck employees were supposed to call in an emergency, so the company had no way to communicate with its scattered workforce. (One of the few bright spots for Oreck was that when its call center in Long Beach was shut down by the storm, the company had an agreement to switch to a partner with dispersed offices whose operations weren't affected by Katrina.)
"Our communication plans fell apart," Evanson says. "We always assumed one or the other facility would survive. We didn't plan for cell phone service dying. We never thought about office space, housing needs. A lot of people lost homes. We had to attend to our employees' personal needs so they could focus on business. These things just don't show up in a typical disaster recovery plan."
On Tuesday, as the magnitude of the disaster became clear, Oreck executives suddenly faced something they had never planned for: extended exile from their key facilities. Oreck had two weeks of inventory at its 450 retail outlets across the country, but its biggest sale channel -- direct sales via the Internet -- was suddenly sucked into a black hole.
The company had to figure out how to keep its business alive.
|
