Local Volcano maybe awaking

To fully prepare for a disaster of this magnitude, you must have a full disaster-recovery plan. You can't possibly be ready for a volcano eruption that close to your data center without it. Depending on what business you're in and how much down time it can withstand, you may need a "cold" site or even a "hot" site. You'll certainly need off-site backups.

Sitting there in your comfortable chair on a nice day, you can probably do a halfway decent job of imagining what will need to be done if the volcano erupts. But when the eruption happens and everyone is thinking about their homes and families instead of their jobs, no one -- including yourself -- will be able to think clearly.

You have to have a detailed plan to follow, and you may even need to hold practice drills.

I've been through a few earthquakes, so I know what I'm talking about.

The best way to find out what disasters can happen to your bussines is to get together with poeple of different disciplines of your bussines and start a brainstorm session. Disasters aren't always hardware related, think of foodpoisening, epidemic sickness, heavy weatherconditions causing personel not to come to work, stike, not paying salary.........
By getting the different disciplines togetter wil give you a pretty good idea of what could go wrong.

I was working for an AE firm doing work on the WPPS project when Mt. St. Helens blew. (We were doing off-site DP from the start; someone else has probably done a transition from local to remote processing that could advise.) The ejecta was primarily ash; lava would cause different problems. The powder-fine, gritty ash was a problem for at least a year after the eruption.

You should lose your floppies and drives as soon as you can. The grit got between the heads and the media, and destroyed both. CDs weren't around then. They may be susceptible to damage, and they are at least going to get dirty optics.

Hard drives have a filtered opening to allow for thermal expansion of the air inside. Here, finally, is an objective answer to the 'do I leave my PC on at night?' question: leave it on to minimize what gets through that filter when you turn it off and the air inside the drive cools and contracts. Your hard drive failure rate will still increase, though.

The most important thing for your equipment room is to have positive pressure inside. That is, you want to have a filtration system that draws air from outside the room through a filter, and blows the clean air into the room. A recirculating HVAC system is guaranteed to let dirt in anyplace there's a crack.

Don't buy a new car soon. After the eruption, blow your engine air filter out with an air hose daily, and replace it once a week until cars don't kick up the dust on the roads any more.

Investment strategy: land upwind from the volcano (west of it, typically) will suddenly become more valuable soon.

Having been through the Mt. St. Helen's eruption, I have an idea of what you will go through if you have a major ash-type eruption.

First: Make sure the workplace will be safe and that you have evacuation plans. Get with your local fire department and sheriff. They will appreciate you asking them for plans.

No matter how much you plan for saving the business operations, none of that will be worth doing if the people at your workplace, yourself included, are at risk for health or life.

Dust masks, first aid kits, goggles, clean water, flashlights and spare batteries and bulbs, access to a reliable vehicle that has at least some off-road capability, a couple of good radios and spare batteries for those. Have something to eat and some bottled water. You may be stuck at work for a day if roads are messed up, and going without food or clean water during that time is much worse than going without a secure datacenter.

Make sure employees have communication plans to get ahold of family and for family to get ahold of them.

Second: Once you have human safety planned for and reasonable measures in place, plan for safety of the facility. Are the fire extinguishers certified? Do you have a hose and a water supply for it (you may need to wash ash off the driveway before you can leave)? Air filters and such are necessary, of course. Check with the fire department for further ideas on this subject.

Third: Data safety. Make sure you have offsite backups. If possible, arrange to have a remote host take over any e-commerce databases and applications you have. If all you have to do to continue to take orders and such is re-point your web addresses at a different IP address, you're in great shape.

Fourth: Continuity of business. Even if you can't fulfil orders or deliver services (whatever the business you are in does) during the disaster, you need to have plans in place to get back up and running as rapidly as possible.

Get with management, work out plans based on the idea that your main facility won't have power for 1 day, then plans for no power for 1 week. Most likely, the power will be back some time between those two. Less than 1 day of outage won't cause any major problems for most businesses. Again, the emphasis needs to be on the safety of the people involved and then on the business after they are okay.

If your business involves a lot of customer contact, can you set up a remote location that customer service people, even just a skeleton crew, could go to and take phone calls? That's outside the budget and capacity of most small businesses, but I can't tell from your post how large a business you are in.

In setting up a remote location, the key is going to be getting people there. If highways and such are shut down for a few days, that might be difficult. What you might need to do is contact a call center type business and set up a contingency plan with them. That will only be applicable if you can re-direct phone calls to that site.

Depending on what you do, business-wise, it may be possible to keep operating with something like that.

Also, do you do business locally, regionally, nationally or internationally? If the business is all local, then continuity while the worst is going on is a moot point, since your customers will be in the same boat you're in. Regionally would have a similar effect and at least people would forgive a few lapses if they know you're buried in six feet of volcanic ash. National and international business means some of your customers won't even know it blew up, much less have any sympathy for you. But in that case, you might be big enough to budget for a remote business location, even if it's just a hotel room in a different state and a laptop to connect to your backup host.

The key is prioritizing and planning for contingencies. Start with talking to your fire department and just go from there.

As a retired veteran of the US Army, I was stationed on Okinawa, Ja and spent a lot of days away deployed to the PI doing disater recovery. Now that I'm a Security Engineer working in the private industry, I see why disaters take the toll they do, in lives lost and business costs. I can't give you anything new that these good folks here haven't already said, but I will tell you this, empress upon your managers to find out what the employess may need to ride out any disaster situation and do what you can. Look for volunteers to report to work, if the business has a requirement to operate. I wish you luck, I know it's not much of a help but if you need documentation in the form of policies, give a shout with what you need and I'll give you what I got.

donald.jackson@carramerica.com

Anyone experiencing a disaster (tornado, monsoon, hurricane, etc.) is open for an experience. Those of us whom have weathered disasters (internationally) have I think, a broader grasp of what it takes to really get into the recovery mode when overseas.

Here in the US we have resources to call upon like the Red Cross, National Guard and beyond. These resources are prepared to walk into a devastated area and perhaps harms way to help survivors. When you are in a foreign country there are many unforeseen issues like: are you welcome in this country, is your visa about to expire, have you had your Malaria & Typhoid shots lately and beyond.

When overseas: if you think the local beer brewery is going to send tankers of fresh water, you?re dreaming.
When overseas: if your waiting on helicopters to evacuate the most critically injured, you?re dreaming.
When overseas: if you think that there is safety in being around the local police in all cases, you?re dreaming.
When overseas: if you are surprised to see local folks retrieving discarded items from the trash so that they can use it in some way to build a new living area, your naive.
When overseas: if your shocked to find a human body discarded (quartered) in the trashcan as this was last nights burglar, you might be next.

A disaster is a disaster, yet without an array of resources to rely upon you may just be the next victim.

Been there, Done that and it is not a pretty site.

E. Charles Sterling
bcdrservices@hal-pc.org

All of the ideas are good, BUT you need to think outside of the box on this one. What good will a generator do you when it will have the same problems as the local power company (ash will clog the intakes).
Do the normal things, like make copies of backups and send them out of the area, look for a hot-site outside the area where business can be continued (if it needs to be), things like.
But in your case, do a few other things for when erupts: have an inside room that has only one door available with some computers wrapped in plastic (a sort of clean room). Also, have plastic ready to cover the doors. This will allow you to grab computers and put them in there for protection (the ash will damage hard drives).
This room can be used to transfer data from the machines to a backup source in a clean environment. You should also have a battery system in this room to run the computers for a limited time (just long enough to get the data off).
Hope this helps a little,

I live here in the Philippines, particularly in Zambales where Mt. Pinatubo is. When it erupted, it covered a whole lot of hundreds of square kilometers of ash and sand. This is due to the fact that when it exploded, there was a huge storm present. The storm helped the ash and sand to reach a large area. I mean, a large area.

Have you seen Dante's Peak? That movie is very close to what happened here.

All of the guys who gave their point of view before me are all correct. The fuel for the generators, the backups whether in-site or off-site. But none of them mentioned this: Transportation. Logistics. Need I say more?

Of course, when all of the planning about disaster recovery have been excuted, how come nobody thought about getting your equipments and yourself out?