This week marks the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastating visit to the US Gulf Coast. The images associated with the disaster are well-known: the anguish of New Orleans residents trapped at the Superdome as rescue teams rafted from house to house, finding mainly corpses.

But researchers would do well to recall a Katrina image of their own: that of a convoy of sports utility vehicles, escorted by armed guards, that descended on university buildings after the disaster. Emergency workers were able to salvage some important biomedical data, retrieving important laboratory animals and thrusting cell cultures and tissue specimens into temporary refrigeration.

At several institutions in the city, however, including the health-sciences centre at Tulane University (see page 856), key research materials were lost. What wasn't flooded by Katrina's waters was doomed by power failures in the stifling August heat. Back-up generators, where they existed, were often in flood-prone basements.

The pattern of loss echoed an experience in Houston, Texas, in 2001, when Tropical Storm Allison swept ashore, flooding low-lying buildings. Dozens of monkeys and dogs were drowned at the University of Texas Medical Center at Houston. Last year, a similar fate befell 8,000 laboratory animals at the Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans. Many drowned in the floodwaters; others starved or had to be killed later. Unfortunately, the obvious lessons from Allison had not been applied in New Orleans in time for Katrina.

Relatively simple precautions can often prepare laboratories to deal with natural disasters, especially in regions where the risk is known to be high. In earthquake-prone San Francisco, researchers typically know how well their buildings are constructed to withstand a quake, and sometimes practise procedures for evacuation in such an event. In New Orleans, researchers had lived with the threat of flooding for years. Yet the threat was perceived as indeterminate — everything, it seemed, would be fine, except in the event of a levee breaking. Of course, the levee broke.

Subsequent events should remind scientists in regions where such risks exist to revisit their own laboratories' emergency preparations. Researchers who work with animals should prepare a tagging system to help them identify the animals most crucial to their work. In the case of power outages, rescuers can identify those animals through their brightly coloured tags and know to take them out first.

Those with crucial cell lines in need of refrigeration should make sure that back-up systems are in place to keep the samples cold. Dry-ice can serve to keep precious samples refrigerated, even if the power is out for several days.

For most organizations, maintaining communications will be the most critical aspect of disaster recovery. Laboratories should ensure they have up-to-date telephone numbers for all members of the lab, and a system in place for who should contact whom in an emergency. E-mail systems should be backed up on remote servers, so they can be kept running throughout. These steps assume, of course, that some infrastructure will continue to function within a nearby community, where evacuees can regroup.

Such preparations rarely take priority until disaster strikes. But every researcher, from lab head to summer student, should look at what surrounds them, apply some common sense, and acquaint themselves with the basics of disaster recovery for their laboratory.