Surviving a terror attack
Few examples of effective disaster recovery could be more dramatic than that of Verizon, a leading US communications company, who had a major nerve center directly below the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
When terrorists changed New York's skyline for ever on Thursday 11 September, 2001, their attack brought an unprecedented combination of problems for one company.
Literally in the shadow of the unfolding horror, Verizon Communications Inc. not only had to cope with massive damage to one of its major switching centers at 140, West Street. At the same time, it was being urged by federal and civic authorities to set up emergency communications networks as soon as possible.
The Verizon building immediately after the collapse of the twin towers (
source)
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the company had:
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No power
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No lights
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No elevators
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No water supply - but severe flooding
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Heavy concentrations of dust and debris
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Large holes in the building
A hurricane of dust and smoke
Chuck Yaunches, the company's former director of property risk management, recalls: "Huge steel girders falling from the twin towers had hit our building, crushing and slicing through cables. Others had gouged great holes in the side of the building. In addition, delicate equipment was exposed to a hurricane of dust and smoke, and to water in the basement from the fire-fighting."
The damage was even more spectacular given the unusual strength of the building. Built in the 1920s with walls eighteen inches (35cms) thick, it had been reinforced with steel plates in the 1940s as a precaution against possible U-boat attacks. As Chuck Yaunches describes it: "Many people in the engineering world regard our building as an above-ground bomb shelter."
Aerial view of Ground Zero (
source)
10,000 employees evacuated
One immediate concern for the company was to look after its own employees. Providentially, the building's stability minimized the death toll: Verizon lost one employee, and a vendor employee was also killed. To cope with possible post-event trauma, employees who had been working at the West Street site were moved to other locations and people from outside the area were brought in to the switching center.
"Initially, we thought we had lost far more. Within 15 minutes of the second aircraft hitting the tower, we decided to evacuate other locations where we had employees in high-rise buildings. We evacuated just under 10,000 people. This added to the difficulty of the situation, because we didn't know if we were waiting for the next wave of attacks, and at the same time we were trying to restore communications. Although we had a tremendous number of employees displaced, virtually all had a work location on the Monday after the attack."
West Street office damage (
source)
Trailers sought mobile phone signals
As if the New York challenge were not enough, Verizon faced further demands at the Pentagon, where another of its employees had been killed and where it was tasked with providing emergency communications for the military. To add to the complications, both sites were officially crime scenes, with very restricted access.
Wireless operations were established at both sites, plus landline and data operations. Among the temporary "customers" were trailers housing the CIA, FBI and secret service. Special trailers were also stationed on each side of the New York site so that Verizon could triangulate on anyone who might have been trapped in the debris and using a mobile phone. Unfortunately, there were no signals.
Round-the-clock operations for 10 months
Restoring communications was a lengthy and complex operation. First priority, from President George W. Bush, was to get the New York Stock Exchange back in operation within four days. Second priority was to get the Pentagon back up, and to set up a communications center for the city of New York, whose disaster command center had been in one of the towers that collapsed.
Then began the intricate job of gradually restoring communications to the cruelly battered city. Three thousand people provided a round-the-clock service for almost ten months. Chuck Yaunches says simply: "They knew what to do because we rehearsed our disaster plans.
A general view of the devastated area (
source)
Business recovery - an evolving process
"At the end of the day, a disaster recovery program is simply an effective command and control process. As a worldwide company, we had experienced smaller losses and like a lot of major corporations, we carried out root cause analysis. Each of these events trained us for the big one. When we experienced ice storms in New England and Canada, or hurricanes elsewhere, we identified shortcomings and made changes to our recovery plans. Going through these smaller events enabled us to understand what we had to do when this big one came along. Even though no one could have anticipated a disaster on the scale of 9/11, because of the evolutionary process and recovery rehearsals, people knew intuitively what to do.
"You need to learn from other people's errors - or your own - so that you can see how things could have been done better. That's the real key - it's evolutionary."
