Last Thursday one of my roommates knocked on my door at 6am and said “Hey, the news says your building is on fire… do you need to call someone?” I turn on the tv, and sure enough there’s my office building with a bazillion emergency vehicles around it.
Crap.
WHIO tv sucks – they’ve proven this before. In this case, they made it sound like the building was about to come down. The good news was the fire was only on the 23rd floor. The bad news was that my company is located on the 22nd and 24th floor. I actually got a look at it Thursday morning around 10am. The 22nd floor didn’t look that bad – some water damage, ceiling tiles down, and damp carpet/papers/desks. The damage was contained to about 15% of the floor though. 24 was a whole different story – as soon as we stepped off the elevator we were leaving footprints in the soot. It was covering everything.
The fire started because of a leak on the 30th floor. The water made its way down through the electrical closets and sparked something on the 23rd floor (yes, water started a fire) That closet was pretty much incinerated. The resulting fire tripped a sprinkler. Water from something (the 30th floor, the sprinkler, or both) ended up getting to the big electrical vault in the basement of the building and blew something which knocked the power to the whole building out.
So our “disaster recovery plan” sprang into action. DNS changes were made and phone numbers were forwarded. So, for a few days my company’s website was being hosted on a laptop on my living room floor 😀 Ok, so all it had was a page saying “Hey, we had problems, check back Monday” We were hoping power would be back on and the place would be cleaned up enough to get back to work on Monday. That didn’t happen. Friday night I got a call “Hey, we’re moving the server room”
Crap.
So here I sit, across the street in a kitchen. I’m surrounded by a half-dozen servers, two portable air-conditioners, cables, and a sink. I have to say, I’m rather impressed with how quickly we got everything back up. I’d say from a tech standpoint, we were at 75% Monday morning. After we got an internet line dropped in and a few other parts in we’re up to about 95%. We still don’t really have much in the way of phones – it’s all being done with cell phones right now. Everything else is cramped, but moving. We’ve got 40 people crammed into about 1000 square feet. Joy.
Anyway… I have to go order toner now because we can’t even get back into our building at the moment – they’re worried about the asbestos that got released. I was up there Thursday morning, I’m sure I got a lung-full of it, but big deal. It’s not Anthrax people – most people get sick by it after long-term heavy exposure. I’m sure I took an hour or two off my life by the 10 minutes I spent in it, but I should be more worried about the 10 years I spent smoking.
So… if you’ve tried to get a hold of me for the past week and couldn’t, now you know why. 😀
