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SLECA's headquarters lost its roof. Vital was on site three days after landfall and had servers back online five days after, with no data lost.
Get Your Free Assessment →All Case StudiesOn August 29, 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall in south Louisiana. SLECA, the member-owned electric cooperative headquartered in Houma, took a direct hit. The headquarters lost its entire roof, and wind and water damage left the building unusable.
The timing could not have been worse. SLECA serves more than 21,000 meters across five parishes. As of September 9, about 14,000 of those meters were still without power, and more than 1,100 lineworkers and support crews were working in SLECA's territory, according to America's Electric Cooperatives. SLECA staff publicly reported limited access to communications and customer data.
Crew coordination, member calls and supply tracking all depended on systems inside a damaged building. Without working technology, SLECA could not run the restoration its members were waiting on.
SLECA was not a Vital client when Ida hit. An existing Vital client referred them. They needed a team that could arrive within hours, work in hard conditions, and handle every layer at once: servers, network, cabling and connectivity. Vital is Acadiana-based, close enough to mobilize immediately, and covers infrastructure, IT and security with one team. SLECA had one partner to call instead of coordinating several vendors in the middle of a disaster.
Vital's team was on site September 1, 2021, three days after landfall, and assessed what could be saved. The servers were pulled from the damaged headquarters and recovered. No data was lost.
Within hours of arriving, Vital helped SLECA put emergency operating procedures in place, so recovery coordination could start right away.
SLECA moved its operations into at least 10 temporary buildings. Vital ran cable to each building, built out the network, and brought each one online so staff could get back to work. Initial wiring to the main building and phones were running by September 2. The servers needed cooling before they could run safely, so temporary air conditioning went in first, and the servers were powered on September 3. As more temporary buildings arrived on site, Vital wired and connected each one. All 10+ were online within a month. In total, Vital brought 30 to 40 users back online. The temporary site ran on AT&T fiber.
Once operations were stable, SLECA moved to Vital for managed IT services and cybersecurity. Vital keeps SLECA compliant with PCI DSS, the standard that covers member card payments, and with ever-changing federal regulations. Most day-to-day issues are fixed remotely, and on-site visits are scheduled when needed.
With 30 to 40 users back at work in connected temporary offices, SLECA's team could focus on restoring power to members, not on rebuilding its own technology.
It depends on the damage and how much planning was done before the storm. For SLECA, Vital was on site three days after landfall, had emergency procedures in place within hours of arriving, had phones running the next day, and brought servers back online five days after landfall, even with the headquarters out of service.
Sometimes. SLECA's servers were salvaged after the building lost its roof, with no data lost, but that is not something to count on. Off-site backups and a written recovery plan are what make a fast restart possible.
Any co-op that accepts member card payments has to meet PCI DSS, and federal regulations keep changing. Vital keeps SLECA compliant with PCI DSS and ever-changing federal regulations, so the co-op stays current as requirements shift.
Find out how ready your systems are before the next storm with a free assessment at vitalsecured.com, or call 337-313-4200.
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