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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?
Summary is misleading.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
I still flirt with disaster, but I'm not looking for anything serious.
More music, fewer hits
Two quick things:
Actually, as much as you personally are intellectually lazy,
You're a dick.
has elaborate plans in case of drought. and severe floods aren't unheard of either.
These "disasters" aren't. We regularly have flooding (localized, due to rains, not rivers or levees), excessive heat (110+ for weeks straight), and drought. That's normal here, benign, and we're not doing anything differently because of disasters elsewhere, because we're mostly immune from anything other than what passes for a curiosity story on CNN/Fox when we hit 118 in the summer.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Oh come on, you're a dick too, patronizing people who suffered extraordinary disasters with your post.
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.
No tornadoes here either. (Ohio Valley, Central Ohio). We don't get any natural disasters... I guess God figures that living in Ohio is punishment enough.
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.
Go home Aqua Man you're drunk.
You must not have been in New Orleans after Katrina...
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.