Mother Nature has the last word
Its interesting how we attempt to use engineering to reduce the impact of mother nature. This week QLD has been hit by a number of significant flood events.
After the devastating floods in Brisbane in 1974 the QLD government commissioned a dam for the purpose of buffering the city from the impact of floods and also providing a source of valuable water during times of need.
The challenge now however, is that the buffer is full and the managers of the Dam have no choice but to release large amounts of water as the Dam reaches limits of overcapacity.
The combination of extensive flooding further down the catchment and the releases from the Dam mean that the buffer no longer can be used to effectively stem the flow having to release large quantities of water.
Articles can be found here:
Another Story about the Dam
A Dam and a Prayer
My brother in law has a house in Brisbane that is now in an area likely to experience flooding today (In fact he can see the water from his house as I write this article) and another staff member of ours had parents looking after a house in Toowoomba who experienced first hand the down pours.
From an IT perspective it makes you stop and think. Plan as we may for disasters its not until we have one that we stop to think and re-evalute the processes we have in place. Keeping businesses up and running and your data safe is the ultimate goal of IT.
However, try as we may to engineer our systems to cope with disaster it appears that Mother Nature has the Ultimate Say.
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