Hurricane Katrina, Data, What Companies Do?

There has been a great deal written about Katrina in the recent week. There has'nt been much loss in lives when compared to the previous category five hurricanes. But when compared financially this storm has casued an estimated 20 billion loss for the insurance companies alone.
Kathrina has knocked out power to the offices in NewOrlanes. The companies that were geographically distributed would have had only minor problems. But most of the small companies that did not have their mail servers located in two places, so these companies have no means of receiving their mails. At least some of the mails would definitely be lost. Not only this, a "fairly significant percentage" of companies don't have a disaster recovery plan in place, let alone one that makes use of e-mail recovery systems.
Most of the companies dont tend to do this because of the cost involved. But in a region where there has been five hurricanes in six weeks it's worth weighing up your data's importance against the cost of setting up a backup server. I also saw a blog that tells about a disaster data recovery system that was deployed in New Orlanes. It's was pretty intresting though i did not understand it completely.