It's Never Been This Hard

Epic's employees have done this before, of course. They made the same preparations for Hurricane Cindy in July, only to watch with relief as it fizzled into a tropical depression. But Katrina wasn't fizzling. In fact, it was moving too fast. Ordinarily, there would be time for divers to come ashore to board up their homes; at least, Epic would send a crew to do the job. But not all the divers could beat this storm home, and New Orleans was shutting off incoming traffic to allow for evacuation.

So Herren did what little he could. He and John Lariviere, his counterpart in Houston, called Epic's boats and routed the divers (including his younger brother, Dennis) west, out of harm's way. Then he and his wife packed three days' worth of clothes, the photo album from their wedding last year, and one irreplaceable keepsake: the ashes of a beloved cat. And they fled to Baton Rouge, Florida, for the night. The Rodriguezes headed to a friend's place in Lafayette. Simoneaux drove to Houston.

Only Mike Brown stayed. Brown, Epic's vice president of diving operations, ignored the city's mandatory evacuation order, hunkering down instead at home with his girlfriend in Harvey. "I've never left," he says. "Andrew, George, Alison--I've stayed through all of 'em."

On Monday, August 29, the worst natural disaster in the nation's history hit the Gulf Coast with a wall of water and winds of 175 miles per hour. Simoneaux, who had barely slept in two days, walked into Epic's Houston office at 8 a.m.

He already understood that this was the Big One, a storm more destructive than any he had witnessed before. As a teenager, he had endured Hurricane Betsy, which devastated New Orleans in 1965. He was stricken to be reliving that 40 years later.

As Simoneaux described the mayhem back in Louisiana, his voice broke and his eyes welled up. "It's hard not to be emotional," he said, "when your home and your city are being torn up." He started to work, preparing for the Harvey employees who would arrive in a few days. He'd have to build a new server from scratch, a monumental task. But he couldn't focus. All he could think about was New Orleans, now the Big Uneasy. The two houses that he and his wife owned. His daughter, who was eight months pregnant.

When the levees broke, "we were beyond tears."

He went back to the Holiday Inn and joined his wife, Eva, in front of the TV. When the levees broke, he says, "we were beyond tears."

It was a good thing that Brown had stayed in Harvey. The day after the storm passed, he shrugged off the damage to his roof, hopped in his pickup, and rumbled over fallen branches and through front yards, past Epic's headquarters and a few colleagues' houses. Amazingly, his cell phone worked--so in those early days, he was more useful than CNN. On Tuesday, he got through to Rodriguez. When he described the sorry state of the Harvey office, it was an easy call: For the foreseeable future, Epic would operate out of Houston.

That first week, Brown assumed a new role as unofficial director of security. He continued patrolling for relatives, friends, and colleagues, and he kept an eye on

$10 million worth of diving equipment behind Epic's building. He had borrowed a double-barreled shotgun to deal with looters, a threat that wasn't so far-fetched. He met a well-armed neighbor who had made a citizen's arrest after teenagers broke into one diver's apartment.

As chaos gripped other parts of the city, local law enforcement encouraged residents to leave. There was no power, clean water, nearby food, newspaper, nothing. Not surprisingly, Brown wasn't going anywhere. He had plenty of canned goods. And his truck. And a job to do.

Julie Rodriguez, 47, is a blond, tanned woman with a N'Awlens accent and hot-pink manicured toenails. Her office back in Harvey had looked just as put together, with brown marble wallpaper and white wainscoting that belied the gritty work of connecting pipeline. When the time came to evacuate, she packed nine pairs of shoes, including her beloved Jimmy Choos.

Rodriguez grew up around Epic, which her father cofounded in 1972. She answered phones as a teenager, soaked up the business, and purchased it in 1991, becoming CEO. She has never dived, but she has a fiery, in-charge style that suggests she's not intimidated by the macho culture of her industry.

Epic's seven-person Houston office is now home to 19 employees and counting. The seating plan has already been redrawn three times. A Post-it Note on Rodriguez's desk reads, "From the penthouse to the outhouse." Still, she seems unruffled by the endless uncertainty. Whether or not the Harvey office will be torn down. When employees will be allowed back into Jefferson Parish. Where she'll be working next month. One minute she's talking to the landlord in Houston about expanding into the adjacent suite. The next, she's looking into a six-month lease for an empty building in Harvey.

"I had to say, 'These are your options: Come to Houston to work, or stay home and collect unemployment.'"