IRS flood spurs telecommuting

Computerworld - WASHINGTON -- A wall of water, perhaps three to four feet high, flowed down Constitution Avenue on Sunday night and filled a 5-to-6-foot-deep “moat” around the Internal Revenue Services building. The basement windows ultimately gave way, and the water hit with such force that the furniture and equipment smashed open steel office doors, filling a sub-basement with 20 feet of water and the basement above with four feet more.

The IRS lost computers in this Mid-Atlantic deluge, but its main data centers are located outside of the District of Columbia and were evidently unaffected. But the flood forced the IRS to put contingency planning in place, and it has expanded its use of telecommuting for displaced workers. More than a foot of rain fell in the area earlier this week, and IRS headquarters, which has 2,400 employees, may be closed for a month. 

Mike McGill, a General Services Administration spokesman who has been working with the team assessing the building, has been inside the now pumped-out but slimy basement areas and has seen how water damaged the building. He said estimates on the cost of repairs have yet to be determined. The IRS has offered a preliminary estimate of “tens of millions of dollars” to repair.

The IRS is located in one of the lowest points in the District, McGill said, and water leaking into the basement isn’t unusual, but the extent of this storm knocked out its sump pumps. Constitution Avenue, McGill noted, was built over a former canal.

The IRS said its IT officials were too busy with the recovery effort to respond to questions. Employees who have the ability to telecommute “are being encouraged to do so and we have expanded its use to include employees that do not normally telecommute,” said Peggy Riley, an IRS spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

The IRS has set up a system, its Enterprise Remote Access Project Virtual Private Network, designed by AT&T Corp., for use from remote locations owned by the IRS as well as from employees’ homes.

The IRS is also using its business resumption planning, which calls for identifying available workstations and space including conferences rooms. “In many cases, workstations and networking capabilities were already in place, but some additional setup had been required,” Riley said. IRS contingency plans include having employees check an emergency hot line for updates. Managers are responsible for maintaining communications with their employees.

Steve O’Keefe, executive director of the Telework Exchange in Alexandria, Va., said the IRS experience underscores the need for telecommuting planning.

“The lesson is here again in terms of continuity of operations. The secret is not to look to telework as a crisis, but embrace telework as a standard operating procedure,” said O’Keefe, whose organization is composed of government and private companies. “We need to roll telework out as a mainstream operating procedure and then agencies will be in much better position to operate in an emergency.

The IRS headquarters building was undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation that was due to be completed this year.

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