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Office Flooded!

Hi All

There I was, enjoying a nice meal with family & friends on new years eve, when I get a call from our security company... the alarm in the office had been triggered, but only in the server room. That's strange, because you can't access the server room without going through the main office. I decided it was worth the 15 minute drive to investigate, especially after the huge storm that had just passed through Canberra

The roof of our office building was damaged and our office was flooded! The servers, printers and some workstations were drenched. I spent part of last night and most of today cleaning up, shifting furniture etc so the water could be mopped up! The carpet cleaning guys have just finished, I expect the carpets will take a while to dry out.

At this stage the waterlogged pc's are drying out on my garage floor (most were turned off at the time and should be ok), and we hope to be able to move back into the office sometime tomorrow, however I expect that we will be a little slow responding to email & support issues over the next day or so as we get our machines up & running (or restore from backups if need be).

v.

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Showing 5 Comments
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Stevage 18 years ago

Wow, that's rough. Coincidentally, I was just in Canberra yesterday, thanks to an incredibly long detour caused by bushfires. A 6 hour drive home to Melbourne from a camping trip near Malacoota turned into a 16 hour road trip up to Canberra and back! Eep...

Steve

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vincent 18 years ago

Thanks Mike, we're almost up & running again, got our build server working again, one of the cpu fans had died and it was going into thermal shutdown! I ordered a new server yesterday anyway. My pc seems to be working ok, as is Paul's & Tate's, however Angus will probably need a new mb, his keeps freezing up. The printers (all 3, 2 laster 1 inkjet) took the brunt of the flood, none are working, two laptops were sitting in a puddle when I got there so I doubt they will work either. Tate & Angus will be back from vacation next week and we'll be back at full speed again!

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MikeRatzlaff 18 years ago

WOW sorry to hear about that! I had a similiar experience years ago, when I was working at my fathers computer shop in central California here in the USA. He moved his shop to a bigger office and that office was on a lot that was about 2 feet below street level. You can image what happens when it rains. One season we had a really bad rain and got flooded by about a foot and a half of water. The rain was so bad that city hall was giving out free sandbags. We were used to the flooding and had already sand-bagged the doors, but came back to find someone had STOLEN OUR SANDBAGS! WTF is with people - stealing sangbags? These are probably the same people that would unplug your life-support system because they need the plug to recharge their MP3 player or something stupid.
The funny thing about a flood (well, it's only funny once you can look past the whole potential-going-out-of-business issue) is finding out what things float. Printers and PCs, still in the box with all the styrafoam packing, float nicely. Rubber trash cans (with sufecient weight in the bottom to keep them from tipping over) float. VW Bugs float rather well, as long as you don't open the doors.
The not-so-funny thing you learn in a flood is that most "standard" insurance doesn't cover floods (not in the US anyway, i don't know what other areas are like) unless you have a specific flood rider.
And here's a tip for cleaning up after a flood - forget spending big money on a noisy water pump - just go in to the bathroom and unbolt the toilets from the ground and then just let all the water run down the drain.

Anyway, I'm not trying to make light of your situation, just letting you know that I know what you're going through.

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Tate 18 years ago

and the irony is that Canberra is still in drought and we're still on water restrictions...

but that was some massive hail storm. Our entire lawn (ie. dirt with a few weeds) was completely white... amazing, especially as it's the middle of summer too!

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Raoul 18 years ago

Thats a proper ending of last year and a good start of 2007 ;-)

Happy new year to you and the team.

Cheers, Raoul



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