Weathering Katrina

As Hurricane Katrina swept over New Orleans, Ochsner Hospital stayed open. But it was getting hot inside. With two of three generators down, fans were brought out to cool patients in the 95-plus-degree heat after air conditioning failed. And as temperatures topped 150 degrees inside critical computer and network equipment, Kurt Induni, the hospital's network services manager, had a call to make.

"We decided after we went down to one generator to shut all critical patient care systems down," Induni says. "We didn't want to take more power than we needed. It's kind of odd to say, but we shut down the patient care systems first to protect them for after the storm was over, when we would need them most."

To conserve power for critical patient life support and other medical gear, hospital staff shut down the mainframe that runs the patient record system, and a back-up Cisco Catalyst 6509 backbone switch. Better to have a cool spare Catalyst on hand in case the primary one failed, Induni says, instead of letting both switches fry.

Doctors and nurses moved to the back-up method of paper record-keeping during the brunt of the storm when the mainframe was offline.

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"It was also a gamble strategy to keep the communication lines up," Induni says. "The 504 area code became useless; e-mail became the only reliable source of communications."

Ochsner was able to keep e-mail and Web access, because its T-3 line connecting to a back-up site in Baton Rouge still worked.

"At the peak of the storm, during the 100-mile-an-hour gusts, I walked over to the nurses' unit, and they were keeping track of the storm online and e-mailing people," Induni says. "If we were cut off completely, people would have gotten really nervous and would have been unable to work. It was our only lifeline to the outside world."

Ochsner's IT staff in New Orleans and Baton Rouge still had to scramble to keep e-mail available, even after the storm. A fiber cut in New Orleans after the storm terminated access to the hospital's e-mail servers, located at another facility on the hospital's metropolitan-area network in the city. Teams at the remote site quickly built Novell GroupWise boxes to serve the New Orleans facility via the T-3 link.

"All the disaster planning in the past," which focused on the upkeep of systems and data availability, "became second fiddle to the need to maintain outside communications," Induni says.

In keeping the technical services running at the 400-bed hospital - one of only three in the city that remained open during the storm - Induni gives all the credit to his staff.

"The human side of this is huge," he says. "Many of our staff people have lost their homes. One person's house is covered in oil. They've lost everything. We've had to go through that adjustment and that understanding, but we're also expected to be productive. . . . We put a lot of thought into what we were doing and why we were here. There were a lot of opportunities for our folks to throw their hands up in the air . . . but we pulled through it."