Moving Forward: Rebuilding From KatrinaMoving Forward: Rebuilding From Katrina

Our information society spent a lot of time stunned by what we knew and amazed at what we didn't. We knew one of America's cities was mostly underwater, and several smaller ones largely destroyed altogether. But we still had no idea how many people were killed by Hurricane Katrina--hundreds or thousands. We watched the images of the rescuers, heard the stories of victims. Against those, the stories of insurance adjusters and Web-site operators and data-center managers struggling to do their jobs don't sound too heart-pounding. But they're all part of how New Orleans and its environs are going to get back to work. And life.

Photo courtesy of Vincent Laforet/Pool

Insurers Go Wireless

The monumental rebuilding effort that awaits in the wake of Hurricane Katrina hinges on many factors. One is the millions of conversations individuals and business owners will have with their insurance agents and adjusters before the cash starts flowing. Allstate Insurance Co., the second-largest property insurer in the area hit by Hurricane Katrina, sped up claims-adjustment efforts by linking platoons of adjusters to its Chicago headquarters' systems via satellite-equipped vans. That lets adjusters relay claims information they gather without waiting for regular telephone service to be restored.

"We are not dependent on a cell-phone tower. We can automatically connect from the van to a satellite," said Catherine Brune, senior VP and CIO at Allstate, the morning after the hurricane struck.

Allstate deployed more than 20 mobile communications vans, which will be available as links between headquarters' systems and the 1,500 adjusters moving into the affected areas, Brune said. Adjusters from around the country were called into the region, but once there, they need to know the details of a policy before they can tell customers whether they're eligible for a housing allowance or let them know what the level of insurance was on the contents of their home. And adjusters need authorization from the head office to cut checks for emergency housing or settlements.

All the major insurers put such teams on the scene of a disaster, but the mobile van link between adjusters and headquarters is a relatively new addition in the last two years, says Donald Light, an analyst at Celent LLC, a financial-services and insurance analyst group. Using a wireless link to the home office "could speed up a claims settlement by 50% to 80%," Light says.

Claims adjusters have all the information they need on a laptop to estimate the amount of damage at the scene. But interaction with headquarters' back-office systems is critical to getting claims checks into the hands of customers. Although damage totals won't be known for weeks, Katrina potentially could be the most expensive storm in history to the insurance companies.

--Charles Babcock

Bloggers Tell Their Stories

Bloggers have once again proven the growing importance of the Internet in covering the biggest news events, contributing heart-wrenching, personal accounts of the tragedy from Hurricane Katrina.

Blogger Jack Ware, a New Orleans-area resident and contributor to Metroblogging New Orleans, left his uptown, second-floor apartment Aug. 30 after concluding that police did not have control of the city. "People were noticeably frustrated, hungry, thirsty, and scared. This is all understandable in my mind and a little looting for necessity? for survival? is to be expected," Ware wrote.

His sympathy waned after watching people steal televisions and microwaves, both useless in a city without power. "Someone will die because an officer was telling you to put the DVD player down instead of cutting through a roof to let someone out before the water takes them from this world," Ware said.

Blogs also carried messages from local government officials. Eyes On Katrina, hosted by Don Hammack, staff writer for the Sun Herald newspaper in southern Mississippi, had this from the Harrison County coroner in Mississippi: "If people find a body, don't try to move it because of health risk and decomposition issues. Alert local police, fire, or rescue personnel to it."

--Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb

Alabama Powers Back Up

Utilities try to learn from past experiences. For Alabama Power, an operating company of Southern Co., the lessons learned from past Gulf hurricanes, including Dennis and Ivan, laid the groundwork for its response to Katrina. While the state didn't face the kind of death and devastation of Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama Power needed to restore services to 636,891 customers who lost power. By the morning of Sept. 1, around 210,000 people in the company's service area still were without power. The utility created eight staging areas in fields or department-store parking lots to work with five permanent Alabama Power facilities to restore service.

One of the key software applications developed by Alabama Power's IT staff is helping manage the dispatching and logistics of people and trucks, including about 3,200 workers sent from other utilities around the country, plus 2,600 Alabama Power staff. "During major disasters like Katrina, our operations are much more decentralized," says Bill Mintz, power-delivery message and systems manager at Alabama Power. "IT lets us run our apps electronically at our staging areas where the outages are, and satellite communications let us have timelier sharing of information with the multiple outside sources helping us."

IT and operations people worked ahead of the storm to try to anticipate the damage and the needed response. "We help them tie facilities, the [geographical information system], and weather together to see how many facilities are likely to be exposed to wind," CIO Julia Segars says. "Together we got that data to our storm operators, who planned on the amount of outside help we needed before the storm hit."

Photo courtesy of Reuters

--Martin J. Garvey

Long Disaster-Recovery Mode

The intensity of Katrina is likely to keep companies at their backup facilities much longer than most emergencies. Some companies are talking about staying for two or three weeks, more than double the average time that businesses generally operate remotely during an emergency, says Bob DiLossi, manager of SunGard Availability Services' crisis management center in Philadelphia.

Since Aug. 25, when Katrina approached Florida, more than 120 SunGard Availability Services customers put the company on notice that they might have to use SunGard facilities. As of Sept. 1, 26 companies had invoked the services, with 19 relocating to SunGard locations in Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Others have called for SunGard to send mobile data-center trucks or to ship equipment to their own backup locations. Ten SunGard clients began sending key IT people to Pennsylvania and Texas locations last week, DiLossi says. Beyond servers and other data-center infrastructure, a few SunGard clients rented workspace for employees--mostly call-center staff--who need Web connectivity and phone lines. (For more on mobile recovery units, see Recovery On Wheels.)

Despite Katrina's damage, past disasters drove more companies to tap SunGard's services. Hurricane Ivan last year prompted 22 SunGard clients to use its services, and the 2003 power outage brought 66 companies. After Sept. 11, 2001, SunGard received emergency declarations from 121 clients.

--Larry Greenemeier

Catching A Break

New Orleans-based SCP Pools Corp.'s IT team has spent the past three years getting its disaster-recovery planning in order, including a decision to move its data-center operations out of high-risk hurricane country. That move helped the company keep its nearly 200 branch stores across the country running last week.

"It may prove to be the best thing I ever did in directing our IT operations," says Tim Babco, senior director of IT for SCP. "We decided we needed to take disaster recovery seriously with respect to our hurricane potential. If we hadn't, we wouldn't be operating this week." A business outage would be particularly expensive at this time of year, since the wholesale provider of swimming-pool supplies and equipment does most of its business during the summer, expecting revenue of about $1.5 billion this year.

The company contracted with IT outsourcer VeriCenter Inc. for data-center space. SCP's disaster-recovery plan is triggered if a storm reaches a predesignated latitude. At 2 p.m. Aug. 26, as Katrina shifted from its original projected landfall in the Florida panhandle, company executives met. Three hours later, six IT employees were sent to Dallas. By Aug. 29, six more IT employees joined, and they set up an IT call-center in the VeriCenter facility.

--Darrell Dunn

Newspapers, Without Paper

New Orleans' daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune, didn't let the lack of a printing press stop it from publishing. The paper had to abandon the city along with other businesses and residents, but it published a 26-page, Web-only edition in HTML and PDF formats. The paper's staff worked from Baton Rouge, 75 miles north, and Houma, 60 miles to the west, where reporters and editors took up places offered by those cities' newspapers.

The 26-page Aug. 30 edition, the day after the storm, bore the front-page headline "Catastrophic." The next day, the paper published a 13-page Web edition. Normally, the Times-Picayune has a circulation of about 270,000.

Reporters also posted stories, including breaking news, as they were written to the nola.com Web site, which runs on servers in a New Jersey data center. Breaking stories ran in a bloglike section where reporters continued to detail developments, such as the planned move of 23,000 New Orleans evacuees from the threatened Superdome to Houston's Astrodome.

--Gregg Keizer, TechWeb

Scammers Grab Katrina Sites

It took less than three days for scammers to start using the hurricane disaster to distribute phishing attacks and worms to the unwary and unsuspecting.

Websense Inc. last week was researching a malicious Web site posing as a Katrina news site, believing the site included encoded JavaScript that tries to exploit a pair of Internet Explorer vulnerabilities. If successful, a Trojan horse is surreptitiously installed on machines of people who surf to the site. The code "is almost verbatim with what we saw in early August used in an Iraqi news scam," says Dan Hubbard, Websense's senior director of security and research.

E-mails also circulated under subject headings such as "Re: q1 Katrina killed as many as 80 people" that contained an embedded link, says the security research firm Sophos plc, that leads to a site that exploits the Internet Explorer vulnerabilities.

It's likely that more Katrina scams are on the horizon, Websense's Hubbard says. Websense has tracked new registered domain names and found more than 100 registered using combinations of "katrina," "donate" or "disaster" in two days. Some are legit, but most will end up with scammers. Some of these domain names have been placed for sale on eBay Inc., with claims by their sellers that part or all of the proceeds will go to the American Red Cross relief effort or those of other charities.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Similar scams appeared almost immediately after the tsunami in southeast Asia.

--Gregg Keizer, TechWeb

Salvation Army's Web Works

The generosity of the public after the hurricane strained the Web sites and phone lines of the Salvation Army. "We've being bombarded by the graciousness of the public," says Rod Parks, IT director for the Salvation Army's southern territory, which has its headquarters in Atlanta but supports other states including Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

The Salvation Army has four territories in the United States, each with its own Web sites. There's also a main Web site for the national Salvation Army office that coordinates the regional U.S territories. "The outpouring of support is appreciated, but it's been crazy around here," says Melissa Temme, a Webmaster at the Salvation Army's national office.

Retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is trying to help, Temme says. In addition to donating $1 million to the Salvation Army to help Katrina victims, Wal-Mart last week was providing secure servers to the organization to better handle traffic to its donation sites, she says.

The demands forced the IT team into problem-solving mode. For instance, the volume of phone calls coming into the Salvation Army has been so heavy that Parks' team has set up additional voice-mail boxes to collect messages. But the Salvation Army realizes that "people want to talk to a live person during these times of great heartache." So, Parks and others have taken turns manning the phones for a couple hours over the last couple of nights. Says Parks, "The stories are heartbreaking."

Photo courtesy of Reuters

--Marianne Kolbasuk McGee