Despite the devastating effects to his business and personal life caused by Hurricane Katrina, Lee Eagan considers himself fortunate. Eagan is chairman and CEO of Oliver Van Horn Co., an MRO distributor headquartered in New Orleans, and says his family and most of his employees are safe, and are now dealing with the tragedy, one step at a time.

"There are so many issues—emotional, business, personal—you don't know which to tackle next," Eagan said in a Sept. 7 interview from his company's Jackson, Miss., branch. "We're dealing with one problem at a time."

Eagan relocated to Jackson from New Orleans before the storm hit, and managed to disperse all but two local employees to the company's other locations across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. As of Sept. 19, one of those employees had been located, but the other was still missing.

And as for the company's New Orleans headquarters, "It is just a complete loss," Eagan said.

In addition to the loss of the building, one of the biggest business problems Eagan is facing is the loss of the New Orleans territory itself, which represented 30 percent of Oliver Van Horn Co.'s business.

For now, the firm has moved its headquarters to the Jackson facility, and all of its other branches are up and running.

Eagan prepared for the storm in advance, activating his firm's emergency management plan on Saturday, Aug. 27—two days before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Oliver Van Horn's data, housed on servers at the New Orleans location, was sent via an FTP site to the company's software provider, Prophet 21, in Pennsylvania. They were then able to get all of the company's branches up and running on Monday, Aug. 29, as the storm raged.

Eagan said his displaced employees were either living with other employees, or staying in hotels or rented homes. Both Oliver Van Horn and some of its vendors were helping to pay the rental costs. Eagan added that his vendors have been supportive and understanding during what he described as an unimaginable situation.

"It is horrific," he said, describing the destruction and chaos in the region.

Bruce Reagan, vice president of operations at Turner Supply Co., headquartered in Mobile, Ala., had similar sentiments. Turner Supply has several locations throughout the region, three of which—the Mobile headquarters, a store in Laurel, Miss., and a sales office in Moss Point, Miss.—sustained significant damage. Fortunately, all of Turner Supply's employees survived the storm.

The Mobile headquarters was flooded with 18 inches of water, Reagan said, so employees spent much of the first few days following the storm draining the building and salvaging what they could from what was floating in the water. As of Sept. 9, Reagan estimated that Turner Supply had lost about $100,000 worth of inventory.

"If it wasn't 18 inches from the floor, it was trash," he said.

Reagan said he and several other employees spent Tuesday, Aug. 30, wading through the mud and muck, assessing the damage and cleaning up. He described makeshift squeegees—fork trucks with big pieces of rubber attached to the front—that workers used to get the sludge out of the building. A fire hose borrowed from a local volunteer fire department helped clean up the front parking lot.

Thanks to standby generators, the company's lights and phones were working within hours on the 30th, but it would be a week before its computer system was up and running. Turner Supply was open for business right away, however, operating manually until the system was working on Labor Day.

The Moss Point sales office was flooded with six feet of water, "so everything there was ruined," Reagan said. And the Laurel location sustained heavy wind damage and lost power. Reagan said it was nearly a week before anyone heard from employees there.

While smaller, regional distributors were on the front lines of the devastation, some of the industry's larger distributors were busy accounting for employees and assessing damage to their local offices in the days following the storm.

John Beaudoin, director of sales and marketing for Production Tool Supply, a master distributor based in Warren, Mich., said his company had been in contact with more than 100 small distributors that had been impacted by the storm. PTS sells nationally through a network of small, local distributors.

"We have distributors down there who've been severely impacted," Beaudoin said. "There are distributors we've made contact with, but others we haven't been able to contact directly as of yet [early Sept.]."

PTS has put into place "extended discounts for those distributors to pass product along, at minimal margins for Production Tool Supply, to alleviate some of their burden," Beaudoin said.

In some cases, many of those distributors could have "little to no inventory left," he added, "based on water damage or whatever it may be."

Beaudoin explained that in at least one such case, Production Tool was drop-shipping products to customers. The Production Tool drop-shipping program, he explained, "works so that it looks as if [the product] still comes from that particular distributor."

Items being shipped included everything from mops and buckets to, eventually, replacement tooling and machine tools themselves.

Beaudoin spoke of one situation in which a distributor "whose market is very close by and local, has been severely affected. He literally has no customers to sell to at this point."

The situation was less severe for Airgas, Inc., a welding and industrial gases distributor with branches throughout the storm-ravaged area. All of its employees were accounted for, and all but five of its Airgas Gulf States division's 27 branches were up and running as of Sept. 7, said Jim Ely, Airgas' vice president of communications.

However, two of the company's small branches near New Orleans—in Buras and Chalmette, La.—were heavily damaged.

At Illinois-based W.W. Grainger, executives had accounted for all local employees by Sept. 8 and were operating all but one of its 43 locations in the region by Sept. 16.

Grainger's front-line branches in the recovery efforts included Baton Rouge, La., Mobile, Pensacola, Fla., and Jackson, Miss. Primary distribution centers involved in the effort included Southaven, Miss., Jacksonville, Fla., Dallas, Greenville, S.C., and Kansas City, Mo.

Grainger employees from across the country were sent to staff the branches in the affected areas so that local employees could recover from the catastrophe, according to Grainger spokesman Robb Kristopher. Some displaced employees were working at other branches in the network, as well, he said.

Grainger was supplying emergency responders with generators, chain saws, gas cans, work gloves, tarps, flashlights and other items needed for recovery and clean-up. Kristopher said the company routinely stages these types of products in the region at this time of year.

Dave Ross is the education group manager at Intentia Americas, a supplier of ERP software, based in Chicago. Sitting in his office on a clear, mild summer day, he had one eye on the sad events being televised from the Gulf region. While loss of lives transcends supply chain topics such as on-time delivery, he admitted that business life would have to go forward somehow.

Ross also reflected on the agriculture industry in the Midwest and its reliance on the shipping lanes and the Mississippi River.

"Not too many people talk about the Port of New Orleans and the importance of the Mississippi River to the entire economy," he said.

From the Midwest, many farmers who harvest wheat, soy beans and corn, among other products, are anxiously watching the impact of the storm and its aftermath on the ports of the Mississippi.

"The Mississippi River is the transportation supply vehicle where goods move down from the Midwest to the Port of New Orleans and then out to the rest of the country and the world," he said.

Back in Jackson, Lee Eagan was concerned about more immediate issues, such as paying his employees. He said his company managed to get the payroll out for the week prior to the storm, and that he planned to pay all employees for one month, no matter what lies ahead.

And in Mobile, Bruce Reagan was upbeat.

He said there's no question the storm will hurt business in what so far had been a very good year for Turner Supply. Many customers were shut down and would likely remain that way for some time. At press time in mid-September, the cleanup and recovery was ongoing all along the Gulf Coast.

"But, every day is getting better and better," Reagan said. "It'll come back in phases."