HOW TECH FIRMS HELP HARVEY RECOVERY

Information held in laptops, server rooms that were underwater.

Kelly Klodzinski, owner of flooring store Floor Care & Interior in the East Texas town of Lumberton, did not have flood insurance when Hurricane Harvey destroyed his business.

“It had never flooded here in over 100 years,” Klodzinski said. “It would have been the equivalent of buying volcano insurance.”

But Harvey dropped an unprecedented 52 inches of rain on the area in about six days, resulting in a total loss for a business founded in 1985. All of the store’s merchandise ended up under six feet of water.

About the only recoverable part of the business, it turned out, were Klodzinski’s computers, which sat underwater for a full week. He had killed the power to the store before leaving it. After the storm, a high school friend who works for Minnesota-based Kroll Ontrack offered to help retrieve the computers and get them analyzed.

“All of our past customer files, all of our past bids and jobs, banking, all of it was on our hard drives,” Klodzinski said. By Wednesday, Kroll Ontrack said, the data was recoverable. The company sent the hard drives to a clean-room facility in Minnesota and will transfer the information to new drives Klodzinski can begin to use to rebuild his livelihood.

“They didn’t even charge me to do this,” he said on Friday.

Calls for data help begin

On Tuesday, the phone calls started at Flashback Data, an Austin recovery and forensics company. This was a full week after the worst of Harvey hit the Texas coast. After boat rescues, tears, mass devastation and the beginnings of assessments on major property damage, workers who rely on the digital world and business owners had just begun trying to salvage information from