Nonetheless tragedy permeated the staff. "What’s unique about this story is the fact that so many people involved in the core restoration throughout the system were on the job working hard even though they knew they had no home to return to," Johnson says, including senior executives. "People up to the senior management level couldn’t get touch with family members. And these people were working 20 hours a day. It was a testament to their dedication."

Beyond disaster recovery, some Entergy employees faced dealing with their own personal losses had to work on business continuity plan as well. That commenced almost immediately following the storm. Entergy headquarters located in the heart of the Central Business District a stone’s throw from the Superdome, high and dry just after Katrina blew through was now surrounded by six feet of water. The building where many of Entergy’s New Orleans-based office workers reported to work every day was unreachable. "We had to make the assumption that because of the substantial damage downtown, we would not be returning to normal operations there in a week or two," says Johnson. Entergy senior executives began to look for a temporary home for the company and a solution was found in the former Worldcom headquarters in Clinton, Miss., just outside Jackson.

The IT team was charged with getting the telecom and IT infrastructure in place at interim headquarters, located in a larger office complex. The enterprise business continuity team, having located all employees either by phone or Internet, began to assist those who could return to work in finding temporary housing in the area.

Unlike some other disasters Entergy has weathered, this one had huge business continuity element to it -- and not just in terms of the physical headquarters. "The business continuity plan was a major part of our restoration. As we located people were able to immediately start looking at how we could best mobilize our employees," Johnson says. "We knew who was where so we could start to look at adding equipment and computers in new locations where necessary and mapping our needs to the resources we had."

Last Friday, Entergy deployed an electronic survey on its intranet, asking all employees to sign in and provide updated information on their location and personal situation.

Obviously, not everyone originally working at Entergy headquarters could relocate to the Jackson area. "That gave us a pretty good handle of where everyone is, what their family situation is, and whether they are available to be redeployed," Johnson says. Armed with a spreadsheet of that data, Entergy’s business continuity team began to build ad-hoc teams based on geography and skills, not job title. "Many people are not doing the job they had before," Johnson says. "Everyone’s job is different." In some cases, employees are beginning to report to Entergy locations in Houston and Little Rock, for example. In other cases, workers are telecommuting.