Answer the following questions:

1. What type of situation does this scenario depict?

2. How would you characterize the preparation level of this organization, and why?

3. Why was Susan the communications person for the scenario?

4. What are the key elements or artifacts that indicate their preparation or lack of preparation?

5. Which component does this scenario reflect – BIA, IR, DR, or BC? Justify your answer.

It was Friday night. All the employees had long left for the day except for a select group of senior staff who were crowded around the conference table with binders open and index cards in hand. Paul, who was facilitating the contingency planning training exercise, turned to JJ, who was the acting incident manager for this meeting, and said, "It's your turn." JJ looked at the next index card in his deck. He read two words that made him gri- mace: "Power out." JJ looked to Paul and asked, "How widespread and for how long?" "Beats me," Paul replied. "That's all I know." JJ flipped through his now tattered copy of the disaster recovery plan, finally set- tling on a page. He looked up, scanning the room for the communications coordina- tor, Susan Lampe. Susan, a more experienced systems developer, was assigned responsibility for all communications during this disaster recovery practice session. "Susan," he said, "please call the power company and ask how widespread the outage is." Susan, who was reading the same page as JJ, looked up. "Okay, I'll let you know as soon as I have an answer," she said. "Anything else?" "Uh, yes," JJ said, "just a minute." As he was searching his binder for the next step to perform, Ed Michaels, the second shift supervisor, started reading aloud from his binder. "We've got about 45 minutes of battery time," he said, "but the generators need to be manually started. I'm going to need power to the servers to keep Web and network operations up." "Right!" JJ said. He then turned to Fred Finebaum, who was representing the building management company that leased space to HAL. "Can you get a team to the generator and get it going?" Looking up from his binder, Fred said, "Okay. I'm on it." "We already turned on the heaters," he added. "It takes 10 to 15 minutes to bring up from a cold start, and in this weather it's a very cold start. We need five to seven more minutes before we can crank the motor, and three to four minutes after that before we can generate power." Everyone at the table laughed. Even though the weather outside was 92 degrees and humid, the disaster scenario they were rehearsing was focused on a massive snowstorm affecting operations. "How long will the generators run?" JJ asked. Source: Whitman/Mattord/Green, Principles of Incident Response and Disaster Recovery