|
Throughout the day on the Saturday before the hurricane, IT made back-up tapes, shut down the equipment, and turned off the electricity. When the levees broke, 80% of the city was rendered uninhabitable and the back-up computers and tapes in different locations in the city were inaccessible.
Immediately after the flooding, Thomas Lovince called his five managers via their Nextels and created “phone trees” to get in touch with their respective employees. IT reported for duty in Baton Rouge on the Friday after the storm. There, on the Board of Regents website, they examined aerial photos showing one to six feet of water on the Delgado campus, shallower towards the front and deeper towards the back.
In collaboration with the director of the LCTCS IT department, Delgado IT redirected the Delgado weblink to the LCTCS website, thereby allowing the College to communicate with its students and employees. By September 2, just four days after the inundation of the city, Dr. Alex Johnson had posted a message of encouragement, hope and information, asking employees to contact him with their whereabouts.
A few days later, once the water had receded to a couple of inches, the skeleton IT crew drove into the City Park campus under police escort to assess the state of the computer center and retrieve tapes and equipment that would allow them to restore critical services such as Blackboard, email and SIS. Among the rescued equipment were eleven 200-pound servers that were carried down two dank flights of stairs illuminated by a string of lights hooked up to a generator, loaded into the van and installed safely in Baton Rouge. Back-up tapes were driven to Shreveport.
IT’s five teams (Programming, Users Support, Networking, Computer Operations and Security) immediately set to restoring and delivering the services necessary to carry out on-line classes, payroll and registration. They commuted to places such as Baton Rouge, Shreveport and private homes, some having put 6,000 miles on their cars since the storm. The system runs 24/7 so while the rest of us were sleeping, some were working twelve-hour shifts.
Meanwhile, after locating an available moving company, IT accompanied an 18-wheeler onto the City Park campus and helped movers pull out the remaining equipment. Without electrical power to run elevators, the equipment had to be dismantled and carried down the stairs, a grueling and physically exhausting three-day operation. Then, once the IT environment had been set up in Baton Rouge, cables needed to be laid, systems booted up, and diagnostics run to check all systems.
Presently, thanks to the courageous team effort of the IT department, we now have a functioning IT environment in Baton Rouge, a back-up site in Shreveport, and service and connectivity provided to our campuses, not to mention the new site on DeGaulle. If you talk to members of the IT department such as Chris Rodriguez and Patrick Eagan (who recently upgraded campus email), they will say that this has been a very challenging but rewarding experience. They said, “While most people were maintaining, we were upgrading. We love what we do. It’s a very satisfying experience to have your systems destroyed and bring them back.” IT Director Thomas Lovince said these sentiments reflect those of the entire IT team and has these thoughts on recovery: “We have to be patient, creative, and learn to adapt and improvise. This is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. Everyday will bring little successes and we will need to build on these small successes.” |
