Hell or high water

Editor's Note: Hurricane Katrina made landfall last Aug. 29, battering Gulf Coast areas in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, killing more than 1,800 people and causing an estimated $75 billion in damage. New Orleans took the brunt of the storm's fury - once the levees gave way, 80% of the city flooded. To find out how the city is rebuilding its telecom infrastructure and revamping its disaster-recovery plans, we sent a team to New Orleans to report on the efforts of service providers, city officials and enterprises to prepare for the next Katrina.

Mission critical is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot, but what takes place at Lockheed Martin's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans is mission critical - the design and manufacture of external fuel tanks for NASA's Space Shuttle program.

Hell or High Water: Click here to launch the photo slideshow

Last August, engineers at Michoud had a pretty important project on their plates. "We had a shuttle flight with some debris falling off of it, and we were analyzing that," says Steve Stefancik, IS director at the company.

Then Katrina hit. While most employees evacuated, Stefancik kept a 37-man crew on site throughout the storm.