Information Technology and data recovery systems at Local Governments stood up well during the recent floods and cyclone in Queensland. It was a time when disaster management plans were put to the test.
Local Governments in the path of the cyclone used various strategies to deal with the natural disaster to keep vital communications open and key data secure.
Despite power and Internet outages, most responded well to the crisis.
Toowoomba Regional Council’s ICT infrastructure was not severely affected as a direct result of prior planning decisions to locate Council’s twin data centres on storm and flood-safe ground. The main ICT challenges arose in the first few days after the floods struck, in supporting the Disaster Coordination Centre that was quickly established.
"Calls to our Disaster and SES phone numbers were handled by a temporary eight seat call centre we set up from scratch," Branch Manager Information Management Paul Fendley said.
The centre took over 5,000 calls, while the Council’s disaster management website recorded 3,100 hits. It took full advantage of social media with its Facebook followers jumping from 120 to 2,950 and its Twitter account moving from 460 to 682 followers.Dozens of staff from across the organisation staffed it 24 hours per day for the first five days then it gradually reduced over the next fortnight.
"The organisation took full advantage of recent investments in new GIS integration that allowed us to to support a disaster scenario using our main customer system," he said.
Branch Manager Information Management Paul Fendley said while records and data were safe, an outage of our Internet service provider affected website, email and Blackberries services on January 11.
"Within a few hours we were able to reestablish our disaster management web site through a hosting agency, but email and blackberry email continued to present some operational challenges for a brief time after that."
"It’s a timely reminder of our dependence on Internet access which then motivates you to look at additional steps you can take to mitigate it. If you do lose the Internet what impact will it have on you and what’s the contingency?"
Charters Towers City Council IT Services Manager Dean Wright looked at the path of oncoming Cyclone Yasi and planned ahead.
"Just after midnight on the Wednesday night, we shut our servers down and left them off," Dean Wright said. "The power did go off at 5 am and we got it back on Wednesday evening about 6 pm, restarted servers and everything was back to normal," he said.
All of Charters Towers’ Local Government systems are backed up nightly and tapes are taken off site.
Hinchinbrook Shire Council was another to decide to shut down all IT services on Wednesday afternoon before Yasi was due. A new $800,000 server room with 30 cm thick walls meant data was secure.
"At 7 am on the Thursday morning after the cyclone, the CEO called me and within three hours we had all our sites with power up and running ready for the call centre to receive calls from the general public," said IT Manager Colin Valinoti said. "We backup every night, and all of our remote users use Citrix."
Unlike other areas like Tully and Cardwell and Port Hinchinbrook, Ingham did not suffer such extreme damage, although some roofs were removed and trees took down power lines. Water was off for a while but came back very quickly.
"A lot of people look to Council in times of flood and emergency," Colin Valinoti said.
Western Downs Regional Council has real time replication of data between its main site in Dalby and office in Chinchilla for disaster and redundancy purposes. All data is kept on Netapp SANs (one in Dalby and one in Chinchilla). Intersite connectivity is maintained by a Council owned high bandwidth, low latency microwave radio link between all of its major sites.
Information Technology and Communications Manager Peter Greet said while many houses and businesses in Dalby were flood affected, Council data and operations remained out of harm’s way.
"Our website was a critical communication method with media alerts posted several times a day during the event," Peter Greet said.
*This article was originally published in a longer form by Image and Data Manager magazine and is able to be viewed at www.idm.net.au.
