Doing business in the Big Easy just got easier. In an effort to make living and working in post-Katrina New Orleans as appealing as possible, the city is experimenting with an Internet network that is free for all users. The system—which uses wireless Internet routers mounted on streetlights to beam signals throughout the city—marks the first time that municipally-owned and -operated Wi-Fi has been offered to the public without restriction or cost.

It takes Scott Kiser only a split second to name the one city in the U.S., and probably the world, that would sustain the most catastrophic damage from a category-5 hurricane. "New Orleans," says Kiser, a tropical-cyclone program manager for the National Weather Service. "Because the city is below sea level—with the Mississippi River on one side and Lake Pontchartrain on the other—it is a hydrologic nightmare." The worst problem, he explains, would be a storm surge, a phenomenon in which high winds stack up huge waves along a hurricane’s leading edge.