Twisters, hurricanes, floods (oh my)

CIO - The evening of Sunday, May 4, 2003, at Aeneas Internet and Telephone began as any previous Sunday evening had. The Jackson, Tenn.-based company that serves about 10,000 Internet and 2,500 telephone customers was closed for the weekend, awaiting the return of its 17 employees the next morning. Just before midnight, however, all hell broke loose. An F-4 category twister touched down just outside of town, then tore through Jackson's downtown area, leveling houses, historical sites and municipal buildings alike. The tornado ripped straight through Aeneas's one-story building, leaving only a pile of rubble.
Meanwhile, Aeneas CIO and Operations Manager Josh Hart, who'd heard about multiple tornadoes in the area that day, was home, 52 miles away in Martin, Tenn., huddling in his bathroom with his family. As soon as he was able, he flipped on the TV for news footage of the devastation. What he saw looked like "a war zone," bricks and concrete everywhere and piles upon piles of rubble.
At 2 a.m., with those images in the background, Hart's cell phone rang -- it was Aeneas Network Administrator Jason Warren calling from what he likened to Ground Zero to report that everything in Jackson was lost. Another call came in from CEO Jonathan Harlan.
"I'm listening to [Warren] tell me what it's like, and he says, 'It doesn't even look like there was an office here,'" remembers Hart, 25. "The tornado destroyed our computers, our desks, everything. I couldn't believe what he was telling me."
Aeneas lost nearly $1 million in hardware and software that night, and an estimated 72 hours of downtime. But just as Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid endured the worst the gods had to offer, so too did this Aeneas. This one, however, was wise enough to have created a contingency plan -- one that minimized the damage and kept the company afloat during its darkest hour.
The company is not alone. After a nationwide scramble to prepare for high-impact, low-probability events similar to the attacks of Sept. 11, CIOs have since realized that their organizations are far more likely to succumb to another type of event -- one that has a high probability of occurring and, curiously enough, is probably simpler to predict: the weather. For example, in June, while the Atlantic seaboard was bracing for the start of hurricane season, Arizona was busy battling forest fires. And in Harris County, Texas, in 2001, a tropical storm and resulting flood taught one IT executive the importance of flexibility.
Both Aeneas's Hart and Steven W.