11.16.07
Devastating Fury
Fire is destructive, at least it can become destructive when it gets out of control. Yet, it is a necessary part of the cycle of existence here on the earth.
When the fires erupted in Southern California, it wasn’t unexpected. We who live in the drier parts of SoCal are well aware of the potential for wildfires. You can see me in the Spring when I’m home, out with a hoe, chopping up vegetation growing near the house and fence.
I rarely even try to watch television, so I had no concept of just how large an area burned, or how many homes were affected by this event.
I’m starting to see some of the photos of the flames towering in the sky.
It brings to mind some of the lessons people learned in earlier natural and man-made disasters:
* Once an event reaches a certain scale, no amount of planning and pre-allocated resources will be enough to deal with the loss. In your network infrastructure, as in the rest of your life and business, you need to go for resiliency. When something happens, you may be able to mitigate the effects, but you may not. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back after the event and regain your balance, so you can begin the journey back to where you were.
* If you are safe, but your neighbors are not, you are not safe after all. Whatever the event: fire, flood, earthquake, or UFO invasion, your response must also help your neighbor. Likewise, your network infrastructure’s ability to render assistance to nearby families and businesses whose connectivity is lost may be key to your family’s and your business’s recovery later on.
* If your network is based upon one vendor’s proprietary products and protocols, and not amenable to carrying traffic or attaching devices and software that is not made by that same vendor, your network is insanely vulnerable. That’s why every network needs to be based around open standard file formats and protocols (and arguably, libre / open source implementations of those standard file formats and protocols). If you cannot drop in another vendor’s product and be almost fully functional within 24 to 72 hours, you are sunk.
* A disastrous event such as the fires affects a wide variety of people, communities, and businesses. After the event, recovery depends upon these same people, communities, and businesses pulling together to help one another recover and rebuild. Outside help can only get you so far. Likewise, local families’ and businesses’ networks may need to start out with piggy-backing applications (software) on one business’s machines, and / or moving their network traffic across one business’s network.
* The fires were devastating in patches across Southern California, much of which covered areas that were not inhabited. The after-effects, including flooding and mudslides, will likely affect more of the inhabited areas. Still, this is quite a bit different from having most of a major city buried under thirty feet of water. It won’t be long until the fires (and the following flooding and mud / land slides) here are forgotten. The storm that flooded New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, Katrina, will be remembered far longer. California’s recovery will be long over before Louisiana’s effort winds down.
* Insurance companies, upstanding citizens that they are, will deny or limit payouts for legitimate claims on policies upon which they were happy to collect premiums for so many years. A number of other policy-holders will find their policies canceled as the companies realize that continuing to collect premiums could put them on the hook in the next big disastrous event.
* At some point, the “no strings attached” aid from outside will go away, and whatever recovery efforts continue must be self-generated and self-funded.
As always, this is solely the opinion of the author, and in no way represents the ideas of any employer, company, or government agency.
