I am the God of Hell Fire and I bring you...
It is 2130 on the night of Sunday 4th April 2004. The only noise is that of bleeps, phasers and warp drive capable engines emanating from the telly, accompanied by the smell of take-away Indian food and the touch of the wet nose of a dog appealing desperately for left-overs! A pretty normal night for a techie...
Then, a few moments later: what's that noise? It is a sound of a type not normally associated with the phonic repertoire of Star Trek!
"Arggh, the phone... ...never mind, it can't be that important; I'll let my voicemail answer it", Peter Wood, partner of First Base Technologies muses, just before diverting his concentration to the glorious alternative reality of "Star Trek, Deep Space 9".
A few Klingon "Qapla's" later, the truculent tone of Pete's cell phone calls him sharply back into reality and he answers it. A person from Central Station Alarm Monitoring is on the line: alarm call out.
"D***, that means I can't watch the rest of Star Trek" is Pete's initial thought.
Pete contacts fellow partner, Didi Barnes, (who, is also watching Deep Space 9) requesting she accompany him to the office to check out the Alarm (it being security policy that two people have to attend call-out for safety reasons).
The drive to the office is just like any other Sunday night - the roads waiting pensively in anticipation of the next morning's traffic onslaught. Arriving at the Town Hall, the pavement outside the restaurant above which is located the FBTechies offices, is heaving with the weight of many people.
"That's odd, it looks like they have evacuated the restaurant". The partners exchange worried and speculative frowns and park with a little more haste than was previously thought necessary.
Smoke: in the restaurant, in the corridors; the stench of hydrocarbon vapour of dubious origin. Pete and Didi leap upstairs to the office door: does it feel hot to the touch? (This is the first test one should do - if a door feels hot to the touch, never, ever open it because the fire will be just the other side and a back-draft may occur as you let oxygen in to fuel the flames). No, the door feels cool - but it sure is smoky up here - what's it going to be like if we open it?
Pete gingerly opens the door and a gust of hot, acrid fumes make their play for diffusion. Pete hastily shuts the door. Didi leaps down the stairs to the restaurant and grabs two wet towels; having checked that the fire brigade has been telephoned for immediate assistance first. Armed now with a fire extinguisher, the partners attempt to access the office again. Pete tries the light switch - no go. The smoke is just too bad; the wet towels providing little protection against its grey, pernicious tendrils. The partners instead resign themselves to leaving the office's fate in the hands of the fire brigade.
Pete and Didi go downstairs in horror and join the throng of people who are thrilled that the post-dinner entertainment for this evening is to be a real life version of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. The atmosphere is buzzing in unison with the imagined flickerings of the fire.
Two fire engines full of sirens and flashing lights; the colours red and yellow, masked wo/men adrenaline-full, gas tanks oxygen-full, Anaconda snakes water-full, blackboard and chalk to write down which officer is upstairs with the fire, jokes, calm assertiveness, camaraderie, utter efficiency and bravery. That is the UK fire service.
The partners are told to stay outside. They wait as the yellow-clad, tanked-up human firewall ascends the main staircase accompanied by their pet Anaconda hissing full of water; looking like some outer-space tug-of-war team. Time...
Time; it waits for no man. A few cigarettes, a scotch or two and a few beers (for the fire officers) outside the restaurant later, and members of the tug-of-war team begin to come down the stairs armed with carbonised junk. Melted monitors that would have made Salvador Dali proud, charred chairs, a partly disintegrated door are amongst just some of the items; many of which to this day have never been identified! The partners watch in concern, ready to grab items that may cause security breaches (e.g. computer hard drives, etc). A giant fan, like something from the Mars colony on the film "Total Recall" is heaved upstairs by one of the fire officers. Still, the partners are not allowed upstairs.
Pete and Didi, in increasing agitation, wait; and wait. Finally...
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It is 2330, about 2 hours since the alarm call. The chief fire officer beckons our two intrepid heroes (well, one can dream!), Pete and Didi, to come upstairs to view the aftermath. At the event horizon, the light from the hallway and torches is sucked into the black hole which lies beyond the entrance to the office. As Pete and Didi walk in shock along the first floor of their ruined office, the photons from the torches play a dance with the particles of stench as they are sucked towards the source of a whooshing, creaking noise: the giant fan positioned in front of a window that is straining to extract the fumes to the outside World.
The partners crunch their way towards the foot of the stairs that lead to the upper mezzanine floor as they walk over glass and debris. A gust of shimmering heat hits their faces as they ascend the stairway; they see convection currents up to about five feet from the ground in the torchlight. The heat intensifies and at the top is nearly overpowering, along with the stench of hydrocarbon fumes. Didi feels her asthmatic bronchial tubes constrict in protest, trying to shut out the carcinogenic atmosphere. She ties a damp towel around her nose and mouth.
Amidst the gloom, and the noise of crunching and squelching underfoot - even more shattered glass and debris up here mingled with much water - several fire officers appear to be just chilling out, their work done! They are sitting around, lending the surreal impression that this hostile environment is their natural habitat: bantering and cracking jokes; perhaps due to some anti-climactic reaction to their not having had to climb ladders and rescue people from an untimely cremation. The chief fire officer's torchlight illuminates deep layers of black snow on the desks and surfaces, the clock on the wall whose melted hands now render it a timeless piece of junk, the huge panels of glass laying smashed on the floor, the melted ceiling lights.
The server room - the suspected location of the fire - is now visually dominated not by electronic equipment, but by a large, grey metallic monster at the end of the room. It becomes apparent that the monster is in fact a radiator - or the remains of one. The indentations that were once for increasing surface area, thus convection ability, are completely flattened out level with the rest of the body of the thing - it looks like a giant sausage with bands of colours and spots on it where once the indentations and rivets where!
Being a scientist, Didi is astonished - the forces required inside the radiator to produce that effect must have been of serious magnitude. She questions the fire personnel with interest, "Have you seen a radiator behave like that before?". They respond in the negative and with equal surprise. Where once the wall above the radiator would have been nearly obscured by a covering of patch panels, ADSL and ISDN boxes, a PBX and the alarm master comms panel for example, all these are now gone and replaced by pale shapes on the walls against the surrounding, darker, smoke-damaged background.
Shock, tears, sweat, fears; the primary emotions of Pete and Didi, but mingled with relief - it could have been a whole lot worse. Thanks should go to the smoke sensor that was linked to the alarm system. Where it not for that, the downstairs could have gone up too. Thanks also to the forethought of renting a secure vault in the basement of the building (in which all client records and other important or high security documents are kept). Thanks to the restaurant below for providing support and alcohol. And thanks of course to the prompt response of the fire service. Pete and Didi go home in shock and try to get some sleep, the only hypothesis as to how the fire started, being an electrical malfunction, perhaps in the UPS supporting the server.
Monday dawns, "did last night really happen?" is the partners' emotional response. Didi (one of her remits being internal security) retrieves the disaster recovery documents from her home workstation and prepares a checklist whilst Pete informs the staff and asks them to rendezvous at the office at 1000 hrs. The partners have ensured that the backup location already contain a machine that can be deployed as a server, along with two workstations and three laptops. There are also backups already stored at this location. The only items that Didi needs to ensure are on the checklist in order that they be retrieved from the ashes are any of the downstairs machines that seem salvageable, a list of basic items of stationery, items from staff desks downstairs, client and other files that are likely to be needed and the latest backup tape (containing Friday's data). The latter is not essential (it may be smoke-damaged) because Didi keeps a data clone on her laptop as a tertiary backup.
A few trips between office and backup location later, much cleaning of kit that was rescued but coated in smoke dust (which required concentrated washing up liquid to remove), a lengthy restore from backup process, a phone call to B.T. to divert the phone lines, and at around 2100 hrs - a full day after we were called out by the alarm company - the secondary location was ready for business.
Tuesday dawns, "is this really happening?" is the partners' emotional response. However, the secondary location is up and running and business is as usual - only one day lost - nice job and lots of congratulations! Over the next few days, the "is this really happening? feeling begins to fade. Amongst Didi's tasks are to reduce the various direct debits that pay the bills on the burnt premises (since electric, etc., will no longer be in use), notify the insurance company, handle the management of the new premises and put a claim in motion. Didi maintains a complete asset register along with photocopies of all original purchase invoices for both equipment and furniture, so just a little work is needed to decide which items to claim for. She also needs to consider secure disposal of the machines that were fire victims. Pete informs the landlord, arranges an emergency plumber to sort out the radiator, a glazier to fix a window broken by the fire service to vent the fumes, deals with the resulting contact from, and appointment with, the Loss Adjusters, arranges someone to remove the junk that is now outside the restaurant - in fact, he deals with most of the tasks that require speaking to people as he is better at this than Didi who prefers the "behind-the-scenes" stuff!
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It is Tuesday June 23rd 2004; nearly three months after the fire. The office is being gradually cleaned up - though it looks rather like "smeared up" at the moment as they gradually wipe clean the building of the particles from the smoke that have an extremely adhesive quality. The landlord (responsible for the redecoration of the offices) has issued a list of proposed building works which has been approved; the main part of which is that the upstairs floor needs replacing because it was weakened by all the water from the burst radiator and fire hose. Also, the radiator in the office next door to ours was apparently blown off the wall and the wall damaged there too!
After a lengthy battle with the insurance company involving loss adjusters, forensics and a host of other people from various departments who were never able to determine the cause of the fire, the insurance money is now agreed and starting to trickle through. Turnover for May was marginally affected, enough for Didi to construct a claim against the Loss of Business cover on the insurance, evidence provided of this to the Loss Adjuster backed this up and the money has now come through. This month (June) though still in our backup location, we have turnover back to normal - better than normal in fact as our business goes from strength to strength (especially after all the enquiries from the Infosecurity Europe exhibition at the end of April). No - or little - disruption has been visible to our customers through the whole event we are proud to say.
Two new testing machines have been purchased, the first of which was named "Phoenix" for obvious reasons! Didi is very excited at the prospect of being able to buy a new set of gadgets for R&D (she *lurves* buying kit), especially a nice shiny new test laptop for herself which she is going to call "Hephæstus" (Greek God of Fire; there doesn't appear to be a "God of Hell Fire" which she'd prefer!). This will then pair up with her other laptop, Morpheus (the Greek God of Dreams). However, she first has to spend the obligatory ages umming and arring over a suitable spec, sleep on it, then change her mind again. But once she gets it, it will be case-modded in a suitable fashion, probably with flames painted on it!
So it has appeared, from the outside, to have been business as usual at First Base Technologies, especially given we ended up not cancelling our attendance as exhibitors at Infosecurity Europe, Olympia at the end of April 2004! How was this continuity achieved after just one day of office closure, and what did Pete and Didi learn from the whole experience?
Written by Didi Barnes on Tuesday June 23rd, 2004
