I was wrong.

After living on the Mississippi coast for about a year, I told my boss (and everyone else who asked) that I never wanted to move again. I had found a great job in a small-town atmosphere devoid of traffic and pollution. And my home was directly on the back bay of Biloxi, Miss., with incredible views of the water and wildlife all around. Paradise found!

But all of that changed on Aug. 29, 2005, with the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. On the Saturday evening before the storm hit, my husband, David, and I discussed evacuation plans. Having driven 10 hours to Tennessee (with our three dogs in the pickup truck) just six weeks before to escape Hurricane Dennis, we were both reluctant to do the journey again.

We considered staying at a local motel, but when we awoke on Sunday morning, Aug. 28, the storm was looking too dire for us to remain in the area. I went online and found a hotel in Bainbridge, in Southwestern Georgia, that would take our dogs. By 11 a.m. we were fighting the traffic driving east.

My staff had spent Friday and Saturday doing their usual heavy-weather preparation. I have about 230 people in Mississippi and Louisiana, and they’ve been through the drill many times before: taking backups, sending them to one of our data centers in Dallas, shutting down servers, covering them up with heavy-duty plastic.

Monday, Aug. 29, was an extremely long day—sitting in our tiny motel room, watching CNN and the Weather Channel to get a sense of how bad the storm was. My BlackBerry had no signal in Bainbridge, so I couldn’t contact anyone either by phone or e-mail. When we saw our hometown Comfort Inn (which was where we originally planned to stay) with part of its roof blown off, we knew it was going to be bad. We just had no idea how bad.

The Damage Done

By Tuesday afternoon, I was on a plane along with David to Dallas, where my boss, Northrop Grumman CIO Tom Shelman, is located. After settling in to our new "hometel," I dashed into our Dallas office to join the efforts to set up an IT command center. The Pascagoula center was flooded; it had an eight-foot watermark in the building. The New Orleans data center, while intact and on generator power, was disconnected from the rest of world due to extensive problems with the public infrastructure. In addition, millions of dollars of information technology infrastructure—networks, phones and desktops out in the Pascagoula shipyard—had been destroyed.