When Disaster Strikes

By Henry Dubroff
June 12, 2009

The devastating wildfires that threatened to engulf Santa Barbara, Calif. triggered late afternoon power outages across the central business district multiple times in May.

The outages lasted 15 to 30 minutes and were generated by heavy smoke blowing across power lines. The smolder carried enough carbon content to potentially cause a massive short in the Southern California Edison system.

The outages happened on deadline for the Pacific Coast Business Times and they prompted serious thoughts about business interruption.

A bit melodramatic? Perhaps. But with earthquakes, deadly mudslides, four major fires in 14 months, and, of course, Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 in the background, a newspaper staff has consider what would happen in the event of a disaster.

At the Pacific Coast Business Times, we have plans for disaster recovery.

Our plan includes backup tapes and core documents stored at the homes of two key executives with a fail safe copy at my house in Colorado. We have emergency lighting, plenty of potable water and hand-cranked radios. We have a backup power supply for our file server, which prevented a sudden shutdown and kept the server running until each of the four May power outages ended.

But we have not thought about what would happen if electric power was not available to get the newspaper uploaded and on the press. This is a question that every business journal staff should consider, sooner rather than later.

And there are other emergency preparation questions that publications must mull over before disaster strikes. Here are a few to get you started:

1. What are the emergency power options like in your building? If you are in a large office building, there might be an emergency power generator that will kick on and run some essential services for a short period of time. That is the best case scenario, but it’s not likely to be the case for you.



2. What are the back-up options for other systems such as phones and climate controls? In the case of the Pacific Coast Business Times, the largest tenant in our building is a bank. And by sheer coincidence, our phone system is plugged into a wall socket in the basement that runs off the bank’s emergency generator.  So, even in the worst outages, the phones were operating and we could call our printer and let him know of our difficulties. Landlines were vital since the power outage crippled power supplies to many cell towers. We are lucky that heat and air conditioning are practically unnecessary in Santa Barbara’s temperate climate. But you may face different problems if your heating and air conditioning systems are not backed up and you are in New England in February or Arizona in July.


3. Who on staff has access to a computer at home that has some/all of your core production programs? When we were faced with possibly not being able to publish from the main office, we learned that several employees at our company have InDesign on their home computers. But they also needed access to the computer gateway of our printer, photo files, graphics and other items on our desktops. This would have meant lugging our machines to a remote location to download items on to thumb drives and reboot. It would have been ugly. Now we are working on a backup plan.



4. What options are there for changing press times? Thankfully, we never got to this point, but in a worst case scenario, it would have been much better to be a day late with the newspaper than to not publish at all. We could have linked our computers to an additional backup supply or two and then burned a CD of the newspaper to be driven to our printer in Los Angeles.



5. What happens to our Web site if the power goes out? Hah, you may thank - proof that print publications are not essential in a wired world. Most Web sites are hosted at mega-server farms with plenty of backup power, but with no power in our downtown office, our cable modem and firewalls were not functioning. Neither were the local-area switches that drive them in our downtown neighborhoods. In other words, we had no e-mail service and no access to the Web. We were able to update our Web coverage only by sending staffers to homes that still had power where they could file and upload their content.