As seen on nationwide television stories, the Midwest has been host to some pretty extreme weather conditions in the last month. The severe weather included a tornado that destroyed a small town called Parkersburg and massive rainfall that resulted in flooding throughout the state.

In addition to the personal and human challenges in the face of this destruction, businesses were caught up in the drama, as well. For example, one of our key data centers for FastServers.Net is in Cedar Falls, right in the middle of all these disastrous events. What I want to tell you about is the remarkable story behind keeping our data center operational and continuing to service our customers without interruption. And just as important is the story of how our team pulled together and helped each other through this trying time.

Disaster recovery plans are supposed to be part of a due diligence effort that certifies a company’s ability to handle extreme situations. But what some disaster recovery plans lack are the right people to execute them when disaster strikes. Fortunately for us, we had a remarkable individual in charge of our disaster response, our Vice President of Operations. He consistently amazed me over the last few weeks, as he put into action one of the most thorough and rapid business responses to a natural disaster I’ve ever witnessed.

In our case the risks involved with the recent flooding were not related to the data center going under water, but rather that auxiliary services such as power and network providers located throughout the state would go down. Also, we had employees displaced from their homes, which pointed to a larger staffing crisis in the midst of statewide flooding.

Disaster recovery plans usually don’t include how to properly handle traumatic experiences such as compassionately helping fellow employees who are personally involved with the disaster. The plans are usually strictly focused on business continuity.

To illustrate how our plan and our response were different, let me share with you some of the specific events from the last few weeks:

• Taking immediate action to ensure every employee had sufficient resources, including food, shelter (e.g., hotel), and fresh water. This involved making phone calls, trips to grocery stores, and extensive orders of takeout food.

• Allowing time for those directly involved with flooding to deal with the personal crisis; and at the same time rerouting staffing to alternate locations. This involved rapidly summoning “on call” staff and launching a fallback plan that included stand-by assistance from our new friends/coworkers in Dallas, TX (Layered Technologies).

• Holding ongoing calls with executives who made sure every single resource was available, and who asked over and over, “what can we do to help?”

• Multi-tasking by 2 very dedicated senior-level management team members during the unfolding events, to make sure all needs were being met.

The overall message and actions taken demonstrated, in my mind, the power of teamwork. And most importantly they reinforced the reason I most enjoy working for this company: compassion. When you have the ability to understand and empathize with employees and customers you gain some sort of vested interest.

To top off the hard-working efforts of tending to employee needs, the teams involved also stayed proactive in notifying customers, providing updates, and making sure that all questions received priority responses.

If you are a current customer of FastServers.Net and do not subscribe to our forums, they are the primary means by which we provide notifications. To see an example of how one of the above-mentioned “superheroes” took charge of the situation, check out - http://216.32.87.206//index.php?showtopic=1223

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I thought during this whole process that everyone involved was doing a superior job handling the situation, but it was not until I started getting emails and phone calls from many of our customers that I truly understood how much they appreciated it.

In retrospect, those of us that live in the great state of Iowa didn’t start collecting two of each animal. However, I know that if Noah was here and worked on the FastServers.Net team, he would be proud of a job well done.