Types of Disasters

When information professionals (the folks charged with protecting major companies’ data) develop plans for dealing with catastrophes, they usually classify potential disasters into several categories. These include:

Hardware Failure Hardware failures occur when a critical piece of hardware, through some flaw or because of serious wear, ceases to do its job.

Human Error Human errors occur when a user unintentionally causes the damage or creates conditions that cause it.

Natural Natural disasters include hurricanes, storms, floods, and earthquakes.

Man-Made Man-made disasters can be any situation that doesn’t fall into the other categories. These can include a worker or family member simply taking out his or her frustrations on a PC or network in a way that may render the system inoperable.

Political/Situational These types of disasters are usually defined as acts of terrorism or sabotage or as the result of riot-induced vandalism.

Thankfully, most of us are far more apt to see natural, human error, and hardware failure disasters than the other types.

But before you start to relax, understand that even the most common disasters can have expensive and incapacitating effects. You’ll read more about this in the next section.

Profile of a Disaster Risk: The Intrepid Upgrader

My friend Kevin is the epitome of someone with more enthusiasm about what his PC can do than willingness to learn how to handle things well and keep them running that way. Although he needs his computer for the business he’s setting up, he tends to take a number of unnecessary risks that frequently leave him either unable to use some part of his system (usually the modem) or stuck with a system that won’t always boot up.

While Kevin keeps his physical system immaculate (you’ll never find dust, for example), his tendency to download and install everything he sees often confuses his Windows configuration and leads to problems running applications. Add to this the fact that whenever Kevin hits a snag, he reinstalls his operating system (losing the updated drivers for his hardware), and you can understand why my head starts to pound whenever he calls to say, “I’ve got this little problem.”

He likes to buy seriously older PC hardware on sale, and this leads to issues of compatibility, especially since he’s not familiar with hardware concepts such as jumpers and COM ports and drivers.

“Why can’t they make this stuff easier to understand?” he frequently bemoans in my ear after he drives his PC a considerable distance to have me get it operational again.

The last two times this happened, I made him promise to run a full backup or create a drive image (an actual image of the contents and structure of a hard drive) as soon as he returned home. Each time, he told me later, “I would have done it, but it seemed too complicated. But I’ve got this new little problem I was thinking you could help me with…”

Profile of a Disaster Risk: Lightning

It may be hard for you to picture the type of conflagrations often talked about in disaster recovery scenarios. After all, it’s hard to imagine your home or business obliterated in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack, bombing, or jumbo jet impact.

So let’s look instead at something that may occur hundreds of times a day around the planet and that can be responsible for a fair amount of damage even though it is so commonplace: a thunderstorm.

As your grandmother always told you, it isn’t the thunder that poses a problem but the electrical atmospheric changes and discharges that occur with lightning. Traditionally, the most violent storms occur when much cooler air moves into a region that has been oppressively hot. A turbulent clash develops, the energy of which must be dissipated somehow, and lightning is the result.

Have you ever seen ball lightning? While this is a rare occurrence, anyone who ever observes this arcing, fiery plasma ball of light and power begins to respect the kind of force that any type of lightning can carry.

Ordinary lightning can hurt your home, office, and electronics both directly and indirectly. Even with some of the limited grounding built into both newer and older homes, energy from lightning can travel inside your home or office, travel along your wiring, and damage the equipment directly, sometimes resulting in fire.

For those who remember or still use an outdoor antenna, you know that lightning can hit the antenna and travel in along the wiring into the back of the TV or radio and blow it out. Likewise, lightning hitting the phone line can send the charge shooting along the phone line into your home or office. In rare instances, it can kill a person talking on the phone when it does. If that phone line is connected to a modem that is in turn connected to your PC (the typical setup for a regular dialup Internet connection), the charge can enter the PC, frying the modem and sometimes frying the motherboard the modem is connected to. Since everything else in a PC is connected either directly or indirectly to the motherboard, the result can be a smoking heap.

Even if the lightning strike doesn’t occur immediately near your home or office, you’re still at risk because you’re connected to a string of other potential strike sites. For example, if your power substation takes a powerful strike from lightning, it can cause surges or at least create electrical ripples throughout the neighborhood the substation serves. The same is true when a car accidentally plows into a utility pole carrying above-ground power lines.

Other Potential Disasters

Also bear in mind that violent storms can bring about flash flooding, which may endanger basement and ground level areas where electronics may be located. Heavy rains can also send rain cascading into open windows and through poor roofing.

Not a lot of PCs—or TVs, stereos, kitchen appliances, and so on—survive being immersed, even when they are turned off and disconnected from power at the time the water reaches them. If they are plugged in and in use at the time the water hits, they short out and may likely become a total loss. Unfortunately, that’s the good news, because as long as the power connection is in place, the electronics pose a serious danger for electrical shock if you touch them or touch anything that touches them (for example, the corner of a metal desk on which a wet PC sits).

Types of Disasters

Believe it or not, much damage can also occur well after a storm is finished. Many people, especially since the Year 2000 scare when everyone was afraid the power grids might shut down, have installed backup generators for their homes and offices to keep at least minimal services available when the main power supply is out. But an improperly installed generator can send a powerful surge out along the power lines once power is restored, sometimes resulting in a second blackout or at least spotty power all along the line. Likewise, damaged electronics and appliances that weren’t fully killed before the power winked out may roar to life again once the power is restored, causing further problems or fire risk.

Where I live in a very rural area of northern New England, we often see “rocking” power, where a storm hits along the electrical chain and sends the power switching on and off several times a minute. Over time, even with protective measures employed, I’ve still lost some equipment to this kind of electrical misbehavior.

The message I’m trying to convey is don’t be scared of the potential damage but understand that it doesn’t take a terrorist attack or other horrific event to put you at risk. Mother Nature supplies more than enough phenomena to make emergency planning a necessity for everyone.