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Just as the human body slowly and carefully begins the process of rebuilding and recovery after trauma, so has the Capital Region after a crushing blow from Hurricane Gustav.

In the weeks following the storm, streets have been cleared, trees removed from houses, business signs replaced and the process of restoring and rebuilding has become commonplace. But inside homes and businesses, residents and executives still are working to restore the normal balance of their work and personal lives.

The balancing act, as it is typically called, is one that plays on the mind of most Americans. In particular, they struggle to separate and equalize the attention and effort given to their jobs with that given to their families.

The work-life balance became a prominent issue in the mid 1990s for Americans. In an attempt to ensure respect to home life within the workplace, legislation like the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 was enacted. States like Massachusetts even passed their own laws to help employers and their staffs separate work and home while maintaining respect and structure for both.

But the chaos of hurricanes is an additional strain on people in south Louisiana. Gustav’s impact extended far beyond its near-record wind gusts, reaching into the homes and lives of those responsible for work and family before, during and after.

While there is no particular way in which the destruction to property and the disruption of business was handled, examining the lives of residents at all different levels shows a few of the ways in which Baton Rouge learned, succeeded and will inevitably be impacted for years to come.

Left behind

There is a specific plan that Earl K. Long Medical Hospital enacts when faced with a hurricane. Staff members split up to provide services at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center for residents evacuating from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. At the hospital, team members pack their bags with air mattresses, dry cereal, Starburst and bottled water. They hunker down in adjacent teaching trailers and get ready for the worst.

Dean Lauret, an assistant professor of medicine for the LSU Department of Medicine who is based at Earl K. Long, was a part of the team that stayed behind under lockdown at the hospital. “Patients get sick whether there’s a hurricane or not,” Lauret says. “We just understand that we will probably lose power and go to generator power. That keeps us running the essentials, which air conditioning is not.”

While Lauret was stationed at the hospital, there was no way for him to be with his family. With a shift of the hurricane’s path, his life became all work, no family. Instead of remaining in Baton Rouge, his wife and two small children evacuated to Tennessee. “You don’t want your kids to be at home without power. So my kids were actually on vacation,” Lauret says.

Staying behind and staffing the charity hospital during the storm, Lauret was able to put all of the focus on his work. “As a husband and as a father, once I know that they are out of harm’s way, it makes it easy for me to do my job.”

The staff with whom Lauret worked with at Earl K. Long was almost in same situation. They had families out of harm’s way, while they were left to work and aid the sick and wounded in sometimes excruciating circumstances. “Our assistant director, Kevin Reed, who stayed throughout the entire storm [from Sunday before the storm hit until the following Thursday morning] actually had to intubate someone who had had an adverse reaction to a medicine,” with only a flashlight for light, Lauret says.

But the storm eventually moved away [although the hospital is still completely nonfunctioning because of wind and water damage], and Lauret and other hospital staff’s families returned home. Being left behind to focus only on work was the only method for balance.

Making a plan

Another common experience was that of a relative calm. D. Honoré Construction founder and owner Dwayne Honoré was neither in a state of severe discomfort and instability nor separated from his family.

“We have an emergency plan for the company that we prepared after Katrina,” Honoré says. “The Friday before Gustav, everyone called in. We reviewed the plan, which included the first point of contact, everyone’s contact information and where they would be if they had to leave home.”

Establishing a set practice ahead of time for his company gave Honoré the ability to divide his attention between his roughly 30 employees and his family. He applied the same practice at home as he did at work. “I just kind of took the emergency plan we had here and reviewed it with the family. The kids kind of thought it was funny at first, but then they got really involved.”

Deciding whether to purchase an extra generator, what foods on which to stock up and how to keep in touch with extended family became a family project. D. Honoré Construction and the Honoré family had very similar practices and, in the end, both had positive results.

The balance was Honoré’s focus. Even without access to work or a gym, he tried to maintain balance on a personal level. “I traded my dumbbells in for tree limbs and tree trunks, and I traded my treadmill in for the rake. But we did really try to maintain that balance, because I knew it was important for myself. It proves that there’s no need to worry,” Honoré says. “I look back at myself, and I’m proud of that leadership I provided to my company and to my family.”

Candlelight care

A typical day at the office happens at home for freelance writer Renee Bacher. So when the storm hit, there was no reason to call into the office to check on when power would be restored or when normal hours would resume. Instead, work took a back seat and family came first.

“We lost our electricity at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday and still have not gotten it back,” says Bacher, who lives in the Garden District. “Other than that, we were incredibly lucky.”

Bacher’s work, which has appeared in Prevention magazine and the Wall Street Journal, was not drastically interrupted, either. “One of my clients,” she says, “was a state agency, so I knew they would understand. I actually had no out-of-state assignments at the time.”

While it will take some time before business as usual returns for Bacher, she has been able to contact her usual clients and send story pitches to magazines.

Family life, on the other hand, is still far from normal. Even days after the storm, things have changed. “Getting the kids ready for school by candlelight and seeing my daughter having to deal with the reality of volleyball practice and games after school and knowing that she will have to do her homework at the coffee shop up the street or by candlelight when she gets home” has been particularly difficult, Bacher says.

Although being able to place most of her focus on her family, rather than on her work, has been a blessing at times. It serves as an opportunity to discover new things about those around you. “I have a new respect for my husband, who used the overripe banana bread on the barbecue in our backyard,” Bacher says. “He’s the guy you’d want with you if you were stranded on a desert island—or stuck without electricity in Baton Rouge after Gustav.”

Letting go

In a dark, damp trailer next to the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, Stafford Kendall spares a brief moment to talk about the storm, her work and family.

It all happened very quickly. Kendall, who is a principal and technology strategist of the Web site and design firm Covalent Logic, received a phone call from the governor’s office [a usual Web site client] early in the week before the hurricane. “We had done some work for the Blanco administration on the emergency.louisiana.gov site. So we pulled the staff together and said, from here on out, anything the state needs is the highest priority,” Kendall says.

Rather than tasking one of the firm’s six employees to work direct the group of Webmasters at GOHSEP, Kendall went herself. “I started working in rotation with the state employees that they had available to update the Web site,” Kendall says. “That started on Friday, and for the hurricane itself we were kind of all here posting updates.”

But planting herself firmly in the ranks of government staff at GOHSEP meant she had to be hands off with her family. “When I left my shift on Saturday night [before the storm], things were looking like they were going to come here,” she says. “So I called my father Sunday morning at 6 a.m., woke him up and said, you’re going to Shreveport in an hour and you’re taking my children with you.”

Throughout the storm, the Kendall family remained separated. Kendall’s husband Jed held down the fort from home while their children spent time with their grandparents and great-grandparents out of the storm’s path.

“The biggest thing for me has been that I was an essential here,” Kendall says. “So I had to give over the care and keeping of my children to my extended family and my husband. I decided I wasn’t capable of doing both and that I need to move them and to just kind of give it up. I can’t take care of myself, my work and my family. It’s a hard thing to admit.”

Once the storm passed, the physical damage was apparent. A tree took out both of her children’s bedrooms in their Mid City home. Backpacks, cellos and science projects were lost to the crushing force of Gustav’s wrath.

But Kendall’s company had been—and was still—completely operational. Bryan Murphy, Kendall’s business partner, was able to keep the staff running throughout three states from their North Street office, which didn’t lose power.

The storm just changed things, she says. “My business partner has taken over the business decisions. I’ve become a production-level employee, and my husband is in charge of the family.”

But the lessons learned might have been for the better, she says. “In my personal life, I’m probably going to be a lot more willing to just abdicate my role as a supermother because I did it through this and they survived just fine.”