Beating Blackouts

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August 25, 2003 (Computerworld) -- By the time you read this, the lights will have been back on for a week already in New York, Detroit, Cleveland and Toronto. Electricity has been restored. The trains are running again. The spoiled food has been thrown out. The political fights over who's to blame for the Blackout of 2003 have begun.
Solving the problems with the North American electric power grid will take years and require tens of billions of dollars.
But improving your IT shop's ability to handle the next blackout will take a few hours -- and you can pay for it out of petty cash.
Sure, you've got a big-picture disaster recovery plan. But little things count, too -- so here's a list of items that may fill some small but critical gaps the next time around.
Radios for listening. When the power goes out, you need information. How bad is it? How widespread? When will the juice come back on? Get a few cheap, battery-powered radios to make sure you have access to whatever information is available. Then test them to make sure you can actually receive local radio broadcasts inside your office or data center.
Radios for talking. You count on your cell phone for communications in an emergency, right? You shouldn't. In emergencies, cell networks get overloaded. In an extended blackout, battery backups for cellular base stations run down. Pick up a few kids' walkie-talkies to use as intercoms. Forget the expensive kind -- these just need to work within your department.
Phones that don't require external power, on phone lines connected directly to the telephone network. Telephone service usually stays up after the lights go out, but if phones or switchboards require external power, you can't use it. Get a direct line for IT if you don't have one already and attach a no-frills phone to it.
A low-power PC on a high-powered UPS (uninterruptible power supply), with an internal modem and its own direct phone line. An old laptop will probably do -- and on a good UPS, it could run for hours. Add a cheap dial-up account with a national Internet service provider, and you'll be able to send and receive e-mail and get information from the Web long before your own network is back up again.
Updated ISP access numbers in other cities. Even if the modem pools in New York and Toronto are blacked out, the ones in L.A. and Vancouver are probably working fine.
Flashlights -- a few good ones, lots of cheap ones. In the dark, there's no such thing as too many flashlights. Besides, you can always cannibalize them for batteries.
Batteries. Batteries for the radios. And the walkie-talkies. And the flashlights. Make sure you've got more than enough. Sure, their shelf life is limited. But they're cheap. And during a power failure, nothing can take their place.
Updated contact lists -- on paper. When you've got only one working PC, you don't want to waste power and time searching for critical phone numbers on the screen. Print them out.
Updated blackout procedures -- on paper. In a crisis, even smart people can forget the obvious. Print out step-by-step instructions and put them in bright-red loose-leaf binders. Then attach a cheap flashlight to each binder with Velcro fasteners. Even step-by-step instructions are no good if it's too dark to read them.
A designated employee to check these items every month. That means printing out new copies of contact lists and blackout procedures, updating binders, switching on flashlights and radios to test them, counting spare batteries and replacing equipment and supplies that have gone missing.
Yes, that employee time is the most expensive item on the list. But it's the one place you don't want to cheap out -- so you'll get the benefit of the rest of your preparations the next time the lights go out.
Frank Hayes, Computerworld's senior news columnist, has covered IT for more than 20 years. Contact him at frank_hayes@computerworld.com.

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