With Hurricane Laura expected to make landfall near the Louisiana-Texas border early Thursday as a Category 4 storm, local businesses are preparing for a day of power outages, slow internet and lost productivity.
Many businesses have already announced planned office closures Thursday. Engineer Jacque Lasseigne closed his Goodwood-area Wardlaw & Lasseigne firm this afternoon, when tornadoes began popping up near Baton Rouge. He plans to keep the office closed all day tomorrow as well, with his employees working from home.
“Right now, we only have one or two imminent deadlines we’re working against, so I already informed my client in North Carolina about how we might not be able to meet deadline,” says Lasseigne, who had purchased his team new computers so it could work remotely throughout COVID-19. “At least by sending everyone home early today, we’re getting some productivity.”
Despite concerns over internet connectivity, most employers still consider working from home to be the safest game plan. The main reason attorney Kirk Guidry says he’s closing his Dué, Guidry, Piedrahita, Andrews personal injury firm tomorrow is because of the high travel risk for some of his eight employees, who live in Livingston, West Feliciana and Ascension parishes. If they lose power, lawyers can still check their emails from their phones, says Guidry; if cell service goes down, the firm will effectively shut down for the day.
Professionals in certain industries especially rely on fast internet speeds for projects and expect to lose at least several hours of productivity and experience project delays. All the design work RHH Architects does is computer-based, says principal Chris Remson, whose firm mostly utilizes Revit and Building Information Modeling systems, which involve multiple people being able to access the same model at once.
“As long as we can stay connected on the network, it works great,” Remson says. “Otherwise, we’re all shut down.”
Remson says the coronavirus pandemic has taught his company how to be more flexible, which assuages his concerns about the possibility of hurricane-related power outages. It’s a sentiment shared by Feigley Communications President Stuart Feigley, who says his agency often uploads and downloads large graphics files that can be severely affected by slow internet speeds.
However, while most of his office has been working remotely anyway since mid-March, Feigley says he plans to decide early tomorrow morning if the office will be closed for him and his art director, who generally go into the office.
“We have a great project management system in place,” Feigley says. “We’re doing lots of work in advance in case we don’t have power, and we’re working with a greater sense of urgency.”
