THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 16, 1996 TAG: 9607160242
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE ALLEN, THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: HATTERAS LENGTH: 87 lines
Nail plywood to windows. Hoard batteries. And now, a new ritual: Batten down the hard drive.
As coastal residents from Florida to Virginia fled or rode out Hurricane Bertha, they swapped tales of madly backing up software and prayerfully wrapping laptops.
In South Carolina, where officials ordered 150,000 people to evacuate, Pat Huffman dispatched couriers bearing freezer bags to the 22 branches of First Federal Savings and Loan of Charleston.
``I told them to back up the PCs and put the disks in the Ziploc bags even though they were going in the vault,'' said Huffman, First Federal's records manager.
She also told managers to put plastic tarps over the hardware. Huffman learned the vulnerability of data during Hurricane Hugo in 1989, when she had to dry out 40 boxes of loan files.
``A computer may be high-tech, but not when a soggy ceiling tile falls on it,'' she said.
On Hatteras Island, Hurricane Bertha brought eight hours of gale-force wind and 4 inches of rain.
Pam Rak and her family remained in their mobile home. But two hours before the storm, she sent her son's Tandy desktop to her mother's place, on higher ground up the road.
``That and some pictures - that was it,'' she said.
At the nearby office of Hatteras Cabanas, Katy Stowe sent the cat and the computer to her sister's house, 200 miles inland.
``If the place is wiped out, we can send bills from the mainland,'' Stowe said cheerfully.
In Wilmington, N.C., one of the worst-hit areas, Camilla Herlevich said that most of the storm-preparation time in her office was devoted to protecting electronic gear.
``We just closed the file cabinets and worried about the computers,'' said Herlevich, the director of the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust, a nonprofit conservation group.
With wind gusting outside her office, some workers backed up records - that is, copied them onto disks - while others tracked the storm using satellite maps on the World Wide Web. Then a secretary took the floppy disks home.
William Waas says such foresight is rare. Although he preaches preparation, procrastination is good for his business. Waas is a senior vice president of Vanstar Corp., a disaster-recovery consulting company in Atlanta.
``You go in with hair dryers and try to bring the system back to life,'' he said.
For companies that do not want to take any chances, the Document Bank in North Miami, Fla., flies sensitive computer tapes to Columbus, Ohio, before some hurricanes. The company stores paper and magnetic records for 350 clients throughout the South, charging $20 to $1,000 a month.
``People think, `We're small. We can put our backups in the trunk of the car, or take them home overnight,' '' said Kristi Woods, the company's executive vice president. ``But the way storms are down here, you don't know where your car is going to be. You don't know where your house is going to be.''
Among the most elaborate electronic bows to Bertha came from Oneita Industries Inc. of Charleston, a clothing maker that transported overnight all 90 gigabytes of its computer operation to Orange County, Calif.
When a hurricane warning was issued Wednesday, the company spent six hours copying its system, which constantly exchanges and updates production and shippinginformation with 17 plants.
A systems analyst, Jay Jester, packed the 36 tapes in insulated carriers, known as turtles, and boarded a plane at 6:35 a.m. Thursday.
``He made sure they didn't run them through an X-ray machine,'' said James Miller, an Oneita information-systems manager. ``He was carrying the whole company with him.''
Oneita started loading the tapes nine hours later in Costa Mesa, Calif., at a disaster-recovery center run by IBM Business Recovery Services, a unit of IBM.
When Bertha spared Charleston, Oneita's computer went back on line, but Jester stayed in California to test the disaster plan. ``It takes 60 hours to load all the tapes, instead of the 48 to 50 we thought,'' he said.
Some scoff at the new-fangled fuss. On Hatteras, Dale Burrus, the co-owner of Burrus Red and White Supermarket, said he didn't do anything with his computer.
Having worked his entire life at the grocery store, which was founded by his great-great-grandfather in 1866, Burrus said he knows storms well. While Bertha ranted and raged outside, Burrus' IBM PS/1 sat coverless on a counter in the stockroom. In fact, Burrus uttered a deep belly laugh at the very thought of taking additional precautions.
``When the water gets up to computer height in here,'' he said, ``that won't be one of our main worries.''
KEYWORDS: HURRICANES COMPUTERS by CNB