Sandy effect on Techexams members?

Hi all,

Over the past week we've witnessed the devastation of hurricane Sandy on the US east coast. I'm actually in the southwest where the most annoying weather factors were drought and santa ana winds, but they're small matters compared to the misery from mid-atlantic to new england right now. I wonder if any members of the TE forum were personally affected by Sandy? What's your story? (I'm aware if you live in a blackout region you probably won't be reading this message for a while).

Sandy as a natural disaster was probably something every IT professional could relate to --- outages at the NOC, disaster recovery, business continuity, safety, security, management and contingency reserves, etc... oy!

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Comments

Lizano

I'm have several stories, have dozens of customers affected and my days have been busy. To share one, I had a customer behind a Qwest CO that lost power, and then got flooded, the flooding damaged generators, so we had to wait until a leased generator and a fuel truck got there. (Don't ask me how only the generators were damaged by flooding, in the middle of a hurricane, I will but that story)

Qord

Professionally: Aside from a lot of extra work making preparations ahead of time, no effect.

Personally: Just about all my family lives in and around NYC, so it's been a little nerve wracking. My cousin in Long Island sent me a text yesterday with an update of he has found and who he hasn't. He was planning on making it into the city today to check on everyone else, but that would include all 5 boroughs, so I don't think he'll be able to do it in one day.

lsud00d

I hope all are safe and sound and work isn't too hectic in the coming days, weeks, and months.

Down by my parts we've been rocked by Katrina, Gustav, and Isaac in the past 7 years so if there's one thing I can tell you, you just have to pick up the pieces and continue on. If you love where you live you will rebuild no matter what type of buffoons get on the soapbox.

Iristheangel

Personally: None. A few friends were in the storm's way but they got away with just extended blackouts thankfully.

Professionally: We have a ton of offices out in that area but we got away without damage.

paulgswanson

Our NE offices got closed, and since thats were our datacenters are. ^_^; tons of outages. What a lovely week!

Slowhand

We had some havoc wreaked at Sutter Health in California as a few of our systems went down. Turns out, some of the inventory tracking and practice management software we use was being hosted at a datacenter in New Jersey.

emerald_octane

Slowhand wrote: »

We had some havoc wreaked at Sutter Health in California as a few of our systems went down. Turns out, some of the inventory tracking and practice management software we use was being hosted at a datacenter in New Jersey.

LoL Same for us. Our hosted provider has some stuff in NY that was flooded. Mind you we're on the west coast, so when my boss came in to complain, i jokingly said "Welcome to the Cloud!". He is a BIG advocate of cloud based applications but i think we may get a little more on premise budget after this.

FWIW I still heart the cloud.

Roguetadhg

hah! the cloud... hurricane has clouds!

the_Grinch

I'm outside of Philadelphia, in Southern Jersey. Our office was closed for two days, along with the University (which never happens). Just a lot of rain and wind for more, no power loss, but I have a friend who has been without power for 68 hours now. I have family in Northern Jersey who are battling flood waters and the like, but everyone is safe. Got lucky and didn't get called to do any EMT stuff during the storm.

pitviper

I'm only a mile or so from long island sound in an area that historically doesn't flood... So needless to say I was un-prepared for the 3' of seawater that came rushing down the street. Our basement flooded, taking out my office (2 PCs, APC, all home networking gear) and the bottom 1/3rd of my Cisco rack (among lots of other non tech items). We still have 12 sites that are down but I haven't been able to help out since I've been pumping out water and tearing apart what was our finished basement.

Oh, and no power since Monday.

RomBUS

I live on LI and was completely underestimating the force of this natural disaster. Did not stock up enough and was out of power for 6 days (just got it back tonight). I also did not work the whole week (power and communication was out for 3 days and was unable to come in because lack of gas) And don't let me get started on trying to get gas around here...some of you may know of the 5 mile "gas lines" that prop up around the tri-state area, I also feel bad for the people in the beach areas of Long Island and the Jersey Shore folk...saddening stuff just from the pictures of homes ripped from their foundations

SteveLord

I wonder how insurance is handling this. I can't imagine a lot of people in the NE had flood insurance.

bermovick

Lots of customers in the Northeast. Solarwinds is nice and red with circuits/nodes still down from the storm.

pitviper

SteveLord wrote: »

I wonder how insurance is handling this. I can't imagine a lot of people in the NE had flood insurance.

It's actually required by most mortgage companies if you house is located even remotely near a flood zone. We're in a "zone 4" which basically is a "worst case" scenario flood area.

Of course we found out the hard way that our insurance doesn't cover personal belongings or finished basements. Only the structure itself, and utilities (hot water / furnace).

lsud00d

Sorry to hear about everyone's troubles, hope everything turns out alright! Insurance will do what they can to not pay you out so I hope everyone is compensated as much as possible.

Roguetadhg

I'm sure on the insurance's view this would be called a disaster for them as well. Smaller companies will most likely need to ask other companies for money to pay out the damages due. While I agree that it sucks (a lot) but you can't blame the insurance company for not reading the policy and what it does not cover. Higher Deductible, less coverage = cheaper policy.

With that said, I would have minimal coverage as the threat of it happening is lower. I would expect people in the south have more coverage because they expect this type of things.

forestgiant

lsud00d wrote: »

Sorry to hear about everyone's troubles, hope everything turns out alright! Insurance will do what they can to not pay you out so I hope everyone is compensated as much as possible.

I listened to a report on NPR the other day re what they called "concurrent causation" or "concurrent disaster". Insurance companies would likely point out that your property damage was caused by timing and multiple factors, so having flood insurance alone won't cover anything.

Also, some have said Sandy wasn't officially a hurricane by the time it swerved in land. Might be something else to consider if the insurance guys and gals started enforcing the bottom lines.

pwjohnston

I had no problems except getting into and out of Manhattan for work. I'm in Bay Ridge right now so that's a bit of a haul. It took me 4 hours to get in on Wed. I feel for those in Staten Island. They're right across the water from us and got hit really bad.

jibbajabba

Our New York site dropped off the network map and the guy on-call didn't know what hit him when his BB spat out 5k+ texts.