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Supporting Role’s Plan Survises London Floods
London-based Supporting Role Ltd, specialists in IT and business consultancy to the event services industry, was forced to follow its own contingency planning advice yesterday (August 3) following the disastrous flash floods that brought chaos to London.
As a severe weather front from France brought torrential rains and thunderstorms to the capital, Supporting Role’s offices in west London suffered serious water ingress, threatening IT systems and power lines and forcing them to turn of the mains power.
“Although it was rather scary at the time,” says founder Marco van Beek (pictured), “I was actually pleased at our own reaction. It can be a challenge for a small business to have an instant, formal plan in place for an event like this, simply because there so many potential variations, but it’s nonetheless well worth the effort.
“We have a wired backup location to which all the servers could be relocated within an hour, while other equipment was quickly protected with plastic sheeting and moved away from the walls and the phone company diverted our main number to one of our mobiles.
“In these situations the priorities are always to protect people first, and then the essentials that a business needs to continue to function. We were minus our email servers for a couple of hours but the company carried on working almost uninterrupted despite the chaos outside.”
Heavy rain had arrived in parts of the West Midlands and Yorkshire on Monday night, with Sheffield recording 33mm in one hour, resulting in traffic hold-ups, flood damage to homes and a busy night for emergency services across England. A youth was killed by lightning in the West Midlands and four young women were injured, one critically, by another strike in London’s Hyde Park. In parts of London torrential rain and hail made some roads impassable with floodwaters and abandoned cars. London Fire Brigade dealt with 350 flood calls in one hour alone – over twice its usual number of calls.
Marco van Beek adds: “We are always telling our clients how much damage natural events can cause to their business, so it’s good to that know we do heed our own advice!”
4th August 2004
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