A Year After Sandy, Do You Approach Disaster Differently? 230
A year ago today, Superstorm Sandy struck the northeastern U.S.
The storm destroyed homes — in some cases entire
neighborhoods — and brought unprecedented disruptions to the New York City area's infrastructure, interrupting
transportation, communications, and power delivery. It even
damaged
a Space Shuttle. In the time since, the U.S. hasn't faced a storm with Sandy's
combination of power and placement, but businesses have had some time to rethink how much trust they can put in even
seemingly impregnable data centers and other bulwarks of modernity: a big enough storm can knock down nearly anything.
Today, parts of western Europe are recovering from a major storm as well: more than a dozen people were killed as the
predicted "storm of the century"
hit London, Amsterdam,
and other cities on Sunday and Monday. In Amsterdam, the city's
transportation system took a major hit; some passengers had to shelter in place in stopped subway cars while the storm passed. Are you (or your employer) doing anything
different in the post-Sandy era, when it comes to preparedness to keep people, data, and equipment safe?
It damaged a decommissioned space shuttle on earth (Score:5, Informative)
Summary is misleading.
Winter Storm Atlas (Score:4, Informative)
Earlier this month Atlas struck the Black Hills of South Dakota. 4-8 inches of snow were forecast for the higher elevations (5000+ feet), but here on the foot hills at 3500', we got 31" of snow. It was a wet, heavy snow that snapped power lines and tree limbs. 60+ mph winds made for zero visability and took out a large number of power poles.
Our little datacenter lost utility power Friday evening, and promptly switched to UPS, which had a lifespan of about 2 hours. Power was restored after 85 minutes, but the decision was made to power off all the servers in case we lost power again, with an eye towards starting recovery procedures in a day or two. The data center was restored to full functionality by Sunday noon, even though the businesses didn't re-open until Monday noon.
We have a complete DR plan, so if the outage persisted for another day, we could have resumed operations at a sister site. The key takeaways here were backup validation for off-site replication, lines of communication between Operations and the affected managers, and validated, sequenced shut-down and power-on check-list. I was able to get on-site through the storm thanks to my big 4x4 and coordinate the shutdown and power-on processes. Without being onsite, we would have had some more challenges due to area wide loss of network connectivity.
Re:Being prepared (Score:4, Informative)
You are correct regarding standard hurricanes. You expect to pack up and leave, spend 3 nights in a hotel, then come home. Or spend three nights reading books by candle light and boiling your water if you elected to ride the storm out.
Katrina, however, resulted in a large city being mostly abandoned for several months and a large portion of the population that for whatever reason (there are many that we will not debate) decided not to leave happened to also coincide with the large criminal portion of the New Orleans population.
Looters set one of the malls on fire and then shot at the firefighters who responded to put the fire out. They shot at the rescue helicopters... I do not know why these people decided shooting at the national guard was an appropriate response, but they did. The looting really was just as bad as they reported on TV.
These people decided that since the city was mostly abandoned they were justified in setting random parts of the city on fire and stealing things. There were also normal, sane people who stayed behind and enforced law and order in various places. The easiest way to do this was to post a sign that said 'we shoot looters' and then make good on that promise because the only person making sure some asshat didn't come and burn your house down for fun was you.
Normal society works because the sane people vastly out number the nut jobs who like to hurt other people and set things on fire. Sane people also happen to be the type of people who see a cat 5 hurricane heading towards a city below sea level and get the fuck out of town before it hits. When most of the sane people leave, that leaves only the nut jobs who think it's ok to set other people's things on fire and no one to stop them.
Police stop crime because someone is there to report the crime. When no one can report the crime, criminals don't worry about the police.