 Our people lost everything. We have people who lost everything. This is no exaggeration. The coups plan is going to cover certain things, but they can't possibly cover everything. The courts are the essence of law and order. If you don't have a federal court presence in a city where there's been a disaster, you have failed that community. There was plenty of coverage of Hurricane Katrina, but one story you didn't hear was how the federal courts along the Gulf Coast survived the storm and in many cases got back to business within days. As a new hurricane season approaches, we'd like to take a look back at this unprecedented event. Hello, I'm Javier Hernandez from Washington. The judiciary after Katrina tells the story of the courts of the Fifth Circuit, their judges and staffs, and how they survived the disaster. Monday, August 29, Katrina slams into southern Louisiana around 6 a.m. She's a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. 10 a.m. Katrina, still a Category 3, hits Mississippi with 120-mile-per-hour winds and a 30-foot storm surge. Nearly 800,000 people lose power. It is estimated that more than 1,500 judiciary employees in eight districts and one circuit court were affected by Katrina. The disaster zone stretched from Florida to Louisiana, but hardest hit were courts in Gulfport, Mississippi and New Orleans. To our court family, I would estimate about 20 percent of our people, including judges, lost their homes completely. Another 50 percent have damage to their home, ranging from, yeah, we can move in and fix it while we live there to maybe we'll be able to move back in a year, and then maybe 20 percent or so had miraculously no damage to their property. We could probably work here, but if you look around the entire infrastructure of the city and the entire area is destroyed, I can look out the window and the law offices are all gone. Obviously, the lawyers are displaced, so we're going to have to move the operations out of the Gulfport courthouse and take it to the next division north. We were going to need coordination in Washington as we started to relocate, rebuild, rebound. And I'm here. My staff is here. The Judiciary Emergency Response Team, or JURT, at the administrative office in Washington would provide that coordination. The top concern was taking care of people. The first thing that the director chose to do was to provide for 300 percent of per dam, providing checks as necessary on the ground. As soon as it hit, we knew exactly which financial institutions were hit, which employees were members of those institutions. We were able to get in touch with those employees and have their checks either redirected to another financial institution or have it sent a hard copy by mail. The judges and staff had many administrative questions, but communications throughout the region were sporadic at best. It was apparent the AO would have to put a team on the ground to serve the court's staff. The Special Assessment Assistance Team was deployed. By and large, they were able to answer a lot of the questions, but they were more than willing to research the questions that couldn't be answered. There are a lot of questions that you can't answer because this is an unprecedented event. Meanwhile, housing remained a top issue. We could have had great facilities up and rolling right away, but unless we had a place for people to reside, once the staff showed up, then it would be all for nothing. While many people, like Lyndon Smith, helped the courts find facilities and housing, the court family pulled together and shared space where they could. Mississippi Southern moved its courts north while those courts in New Orleans moved west. It's not always easy to relocate 45 or 85 miles from home, but once the judge makes that call, then things begin to fall in place. Well, we're comfortable. As you can see, we have employees working in the hallway of the courthouse here. To get to the fax machine, you literally have to crawl over a couple of bodies, but we're making it work. We know their families, and their families know our families. So we wanted to take them in as a family and help them, but we also wanted to get the court up and running so the business of the court could continue. Moving the courts created other challenges. When this hurricane hit, it knocked out the only court house, the only functional court house in the eastern district of Louisiana, which is in New Orleans. That's where all our judges are. That's where our clerk's office is. That's where everything is. But under federal law, it's illegal for a district court to operate outside of its district. Courts are the essence of law and order. If you don't have a federal court presence in a city where there's been a disaster, you have failed that community. So emergency legislation was fast-tracked through Capitol Hill, and within 11 days, new law enabled the eastern district of Louisiana to resume court operations. That legislation assisted them a lot in being able to actually conduct business here that they would not have otherwise been able to do. We've been trying to do is to make sure that the judicial process goes uninterrupted in terms of proper representation of clients. To do that, the court needed a way to communicate with attorneys, but a major communications hub was wiped out by the floodwaters. Communications was zero. Even the cell phones, if you had a 228 area code, it wasn't operational. Even though I was in Hattiesburg with a 228 exchange, I couldn't get through anybody in Jackson. Landlines were downed. It was just hit or miss at best. But it wasn't just phone lines that were knocked out. The outage also impacted the court's data communications network and email. We were notified that Sprint had suffered a major outage in New Orleans, Louisiana, so it kind of left us segmented from the rest of the world. New Orleans hosts a lot of sites and a lot of people were not aware of that impact. In fact, we were not aware until we had to go into DEF CON to try to shore up all the courts that happened to be affected when New Orleans went down. I think New Orleans hosted a 20X to 30 sites, all the way from what I have a list from Indiana to Ohio to West Virginia. And again, the water did not reach that far up, but their sites were down. IT engineers helped create alternate gateways to restore connectivity to the courts. Once reconnected to the internet and to the judiciary's DCN, the courts leveraged online assets like electronic case filing. We went electronic the first of this year. It's been an incredible efficiency for our court and for the bar. What an impact it has on being able to relocate offices. Throughout the recovery, there were many more lessons learned that applied to the entire judiciary. Disasters can strike anywhere. People always say, well, the first thing that goes when you have a catastrophe is the coop, the continuity of operations plan. Well, that's not really true. First place, it doesn't all go. It is true that in our case we had not thought about Houston and we wound up in Houston. But what doesn't go, what stays with you is the learning that you acquire about how you think your way through the problem. Recovery efforts are ongoing in the region. We'd like to thank the men and women of the courts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas for sharing their stories. From the Administrative Office in Washington, I'm Javier Hernandez.