It's Never Been This Hard

She's trying to strike a delicate balance between compassion and pragmatism. Her employees are worried about their homes and families. Indeed, some have yet to return to work, and some have quit. Rodriguez kept everyone on the payroll for two weeks following Katrina, whether they worked or not. After that, she says, "I had to say, 'These are your options: Come to Houston to work, or stay home and collect unemployment.' "

Epic's employees know they're lucky. Katrina destroyed other businesses. Still, they can't dodge the stress. For Simoneaux, home is the hotel room he shares with his pet bird, a Latino Cockatiel called Lady; his wife has relocated with her employer to Birmingham, Alabama. Herren, who carries three cell phones and whose eyes are bloodshot for lack of sleep, is a six-hour drive from his wife--and from the house they left behind with a tree on the new roof.

On September 13, two weeks after Katrina, Rodriguez called a staff meeting. "I know this has been hard for everybody, but we have a business to run," she said. "If you can just hang on a little longer, we're not going to be here forever." She has hired a contractor to repair the Harvey office, but moving back hinges on getting phone service, which could take until January.

Rodriguez herself is sleeping on an air mattress at her daughter's apartment, borrowing clothes and missing her husband. She hasn't seen her house since evacuating. Her dog, Jetta, is on Valium, apparently stressed out.

Rodriguez knows just how she feels.

"The deeper you get, the lonelier it is," says diver Grant Gillespie. "You start thinking, It's a long way back to the boat. I better watch my ass."

"Blowing bubbles" doesn't do justice to divers' actual work. Even the routine stuff, connecting new pipelines, is unimaginably difficult. In shallow water, less than 300 feet, the bottom is thick with mud from the Mississippi. You can't see anything, so your hands become your eyes. You actually train by making repairs while wearing a blindfold. The only sounds at 200 feet are the bubbles and a dive supervisor on your headset. "The deeper you get, the lonelier it is," says Gillespie. "You start thinking, It's a long way back to the boat. I better watch my ass."

Especially now. "After a storm, the biggest fear is the unknown," says Brown, a former diver. Usually, divers know the network of pipelines on the bottom, but a hurricane can obliterate the map. A loose pipe can suck a diver in or blindside him. Although the lines are equipped with shutoff valves to prevent spills, leaks are still a risk, so divers slather exposed skin with petroleum jelly to avoid oil and other rash-inducing contaminants.

A week after Katrina, Epic has 140 divers and offshore staff on the water, working on nine jobs, more than half related to Katrina. Already it has discovered two platforms toppled over. The pipeline below wasn't badly hurt, but Katrina was too powerful not to have done extensive underwater damage somewhere. "Ivan didn't seem bad at first, but there were pipelines that moved a mile, and some we never found again," says Herren.

Business is crazy good, really. Some energy companies are actually paying to keep divers on hold, to avoid losing them to another customer. But the rush to rebuild is causing bottlenecks, too. John Lariviere has been trying for days to get supplies to the Seahorse, the largest in Epic's six-boat fleet. As long as food arrives every 10 days, a diving boat can stay offshore for weeks or months. But there just aren't many boats available; Katrina destroyed thousands of vessels, and everyone in the Gulf is chasing a ride. "It's never been this hard," says

Lariviere. If the Seahorse has to leave the job site and make its own grocery run, Epic loses around $50,000 in revenue a day.

Lariviere is a former diver with a churlish, sarcastic demeanor. It's hard to tell when he's teasing and when he's pissed; if his pressed-lips expression is from the Skoal in his mouth or the intensity of his business. Diving, he says, "is a bunch of guys getting together to do something really complicated. And things usually go"--he pauses, censoring himself--"let's just say, a little rough."

The first week, Lariviere couldn't find the gas mixture that divers breathe underwater. He located a supplier in Texas, which meant trucking empty cylinders several hundred miles. And he couldn't use Epic's bottles, because they were stored in Harvey, which was off limits according to whichever official was in charge that day. Lariviere had to rent containers. That's the price of doing business in Katrina's wake.

The long and tortuous recovery from Katrina continues, with each day bringing small steps toward normalcy. Epic's Houston office has added two more phone lines. In Harvey a construction crew is tearing down the gap-toothed brick wall so it can erect a new one.