I think everyone really enjoys a story of a journey. A story of a quest, and the individual or organization overcoming adversity to undertake it and an eventual victory.
That’s what this is, a chronicle of something that happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This tale has a beginning, a middle, and an end but its design is to serve as an example of what can happen during a disaster, and to educate the simple things you, the reader, can do to avoid the fate of the people in this tale.
To this day, the post-Katrina Web site and email recovery was the largest and longest effort of my entire career.I doubt I’ll ever see a similar situation. Starting down this path to help the businesses and organizations affected by the storm, I had no idea how to even best approach it. Most of the soon to be customers were suffering from a mild to severe case of PTSD which made even approaching them a stressful situation.
I had never been in a recovery type situation before. I was a web designer, I built websites and hosted them. Never before was there a ticking clock. The prime window for restoring service had already passed, and we became involved in a sort of archaeology dig of Web hosting.
The best you can is good enough.
I’m extremely proud of what we were able to accomplish and thinking back to those days always humbles me.