Hampden/ Zimmerman Electric Supply is an electric supply company in Western Massachusetts. At the time we had 3 branches and approximately 65 employees. Our annual sales were around 20 million. The main branch in Springfield did approximately 80% of our business and housed the offices for the entire company. We had 2 branches, the closest of which was in Northampton about 25 minutes away. The other was an hour away in Pittsfield.
Early morning on Sunday, July 19, 1998, the corporate headquarters and main branch of H/Z Electric burned to the ground. The fire smoldered for many hours before erupting and being seen by a passerby at 3am who alerted the fire station next door. Although the cause is officially undetermined, the fire examiners believe it was probably started by a dimmer display that had been set up on the counter that Friday.
Even though we were situated next door to the main Springfield fire station, our building was on a list as being likely to be completely destroyed in the event of a fire. There was no sprinkler system and no fire detection system. It was an old building with numerous addons and it was likely that the water from the hoses would actually spread the fire to places where it couldn't be fought.
After receiving the call Sunday morning, I drove to Springfield thinking "I knew I should have told Robin to take home that system tape". I was hoping that the fire might actually be contained before it hit the offices, but as I drove down Interstate 291 all I could see was massive plumes of smoke over the Springfield skyline.
As I stood around watching the fire, I started my "oops" list, my hindsight list of what we should have down to be ready for this. The first item on the list was having a list of employees and their phone numbers. The second was support number for the vendor of our Eclipse ERP system.
Later that morning I went up to the Northampton store, about half an hour away, to start the recovery process. It was then that I discovered that recovery from a disaster was unfortunately covered by the sales departments, not maintenance departments. Sales departments don't work on Sunday and, as I was to discover numerous times, have never heard of Fed Ex or critical need.
We always have 2 backup tapes off site, just in case there is a problem with the latest one. I had retrieved our most current backup tape and drove up to inform my friends that I would not be able to leave with them the following day. As I was driving along the narrow mountain roads in Western Mass, I came around a sharp corner to face a red sports car careening down the road in my lane. We just barely miss each other. All I could think of at the time was that if we'd had a head on collision, there'd go the back up tape. See, there is a reason for two off site tapes!
I'll talk about what we had to go through to recover in the next article in the series.
