A Year After Sandy, Do You Approach Disaster Differently?

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?

Re:Being prepared

[CastrTroy]

I wonder how much societal collapse could be caused by a storm. Sure, not complete societal collapse, and not national societal collapse, but it seems likely that many parts of a single city's society could collapse if there was a big storm. Maybe in the US, this is much less likely, because the government would send in disaster relief, but look at what happened when Haiti was hit by that earthquake. Had the world not come to their rescue, things could have been much worse, and they were pretty bad anyway. Many cities in less better off nations could be pretty much completely ruined by a large storm.

I treat disaster exactly the same as I did

[EmagGeek]

Sandy did not change my view of disasters. I still remain prepared for disaster, and when stuff looks like it is going to happen, I use my brain instead of burying my head in the sand and thinking things like "oh it won't happen to me" or "oh well Government will be there to save me," which is exactly what happened in New York.

The entire city lived in a state of denial leading up to Sandy, and continued to live in that state for a week afterward, even having the nerve to attempt to hold the NYC marathon despite there being people in need of the resources that were being used for it. Marathon organizers had generators, clean water, gasoline, and everything they wanted, while thousands of people all over the city had no power, no water, and no means of transportation out of the city.

Mayor Bloomberg is a disgrace.

Re:It damaged a decommissioned space shuttle on ea

[Anonymous Coward]

Summary is misleading.

Was it really misleading, or did your ability to assume really stoop to that level of ignorance in thinking there are actually lung-breathers here on earth who think a storm is large enough to escape the very atmosphere it thrives in to damage an object in orbit...

...and that said lung-breathers congregate here.

Thanks. Appreciate that.

Re:Being prepared

[NeutronCowboy]

Of course. The next, obvious question though is: what is going to bring about societal collapse? And the answers I get to that range from riots to super storms to earthquakes to hyperinflation to asteroid impact to brand new plague. Most of the answers also mysteriously assume that those events are likely enough to warrant shelling out multiple thousands of dollars immediately.

The reality is that we've been through everything short of an asteroid impact, and civilization has not collapsed. Especially not western civilization. Maybe that's why Europeans are non-plussed by all these possibilities, and look at the US like a family does at its crazy uncle who is raving about government brain scans: they've been through all of it, and they've come out alright. True, there were a few World Wars that came about from some of those events, but it wasn't a collapse of civilization. If anything, it proved that civilization was rebuilt pretty much instantly by citizens working together and sharing their meager means.

Full disclosure: my parents still tell me stories of The War. It's as close as Europe ever came to total collapse, and it didn't.