Disaster Recovery Planned on the Fly

Computerworld - Flooding? It's been snowing. Why are we talking about flooding? My new boss had asked me to step into his office, closed the door and lowered his voice.
"The senior management team is concerned that we could experience some flooding when the snow melts. Can you check into this for me?"
I took a deep breath. I was having a hard enough time adjusting to record snowfall. I had had to learn how to put chains on my SUV (which I naively purchased sans four-wheel drive), I was continually cold, and all I could think about was how warm it must be in Florida. Given the icy chill in the air, I was having a hard time seeing a flood threat. Still, I had to respond. Can you spell disaster recovery?
It's part of the job of security professionals to formulate contingency and disaster recovery plans. But which comes first, the chicken or the egg? In this case, it's the egg. Normally, one would prepare a comprehensive contingency plan, which would include specific disaster recovery plans as critical subsets. But I was being asked for one subset immediately.
In order to draw up a flood disaster recovery plan, I needed to understand the flood risk for our various office locations in short order. How in the world does one go about doing that? I had no idea how to research weather conditions. I turned to Google, my best friend.
Being new to the region, I had no memories to draw upon, and my research into the flood history of our office locations horrified me. I found pictures from about seven years earlier of two cities where we had offices half-submerged under water.
So the pattern was for a flood to hit every seven to 10 years. The next step was to understand what created the flood conditions. What lakes and rivers were nearby? What was the water level at that time? Was it unusually warm or wet? Were there global weather conditions that contributed to the flooding? With the news about the Indian Ocean tsunami fresh in my mind, I knew that Mother Nature was to be respected.
I was surprised at the number of resources I found online. The U.S. Geological Survey, for one, provides all kinds of useful "water" information. I learned that the major lakes and rivers in the area are monitored, and I was able to download the latest information on water levels and "stream flow" data. I found historical data that allowed me to compare