The chief information officer (CIO) of New Orleans, Greg Meffert, has decided to base his disaster recovery program on Wi-Fi and VoIP. He learned his lessons in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2006 when he used a Cisco router and a Vonage client to connect the mayor of the city with President Bush. Meffert also found that there was no plan for re-establishing public communications, nor was there an infrastructure capable of processing the huge volume of damage assessments, claims, permits, and other bureaucratic forms required to rebuild after the storm. The city was not prepared for a storm of Katrina's magnitude. It relied on telecommunication vendors to provide services and expected these services to come back, but they never did. Meffert and his team improvised solutions in the chaos to create a network that could handle some of the city's immediate needs. In the future, VoIP will replace traditional telephony during city emergencies. Calls will be routed from laptop voice clients or VoIP phones via a Cisco Call Manager that can connect to other VoIP phones or the public phone network. Meffert also insisted that EarthLink provide free Wi-Fi Internet over its 15-square-mile downtown wireless mesh network so that people with Wi-Fi enabled laptops or VoIP phones can use it during a storm. Another part of Meffert's recovery program is the creation of backup data center in Austin, Texas, which will take over when New Orleans is threatened by future hurricanes.