Business Continuity: Real Life Stories

Southern California Business is Shaken

Robert “Bob” Lorsch remembers January 17, 1994 very well. At about 4:30 am, he and his neighbors in Los Angeles and for that matter most of Southern California were awakened by the violent shaking of what came to be called the Northridge Earthquake. With a Richter scale magnitude of 6.7, the ground acceleration was the highest ever recorded in an urban area in North America. It would prove to be the most costly earthquake in United States history. The earthquake damaged up to 1,000 buildings and knocked out power and water service for tens of thousands.

Bob Lorsch’s marketing and public relations company had its offices on the top floor of a high-rise suburban office building near the quake’s epicenter. In an instant he was wiped out. Every piece of information, all his company’s work-in-progress, was on computers in his office and what hadn’t been destroyed, was inaccessible for weeks because the building was declared structurally unsafe.

“We had considerable damage and the building was shut down so the only option was to relocate the business to my home,” Lorsch recalls. “But my home was also devastated and I needed disaster relief just to rebuild my home. Then I didn’t have much of the data and information that was central to my business. I had to continue to pay my people but I wasn’t collecting my receivables so it was a very, very difficult time for me.”

In the end a client came through with a new project and over time Bob was able to reconstruct his business. Out of the ashes of this disaster Bob conceived of a service where no matter where in the world or whatever the circumstance, individuals and families would never be far from their personal records – birth certificates, vital forms, insurance and healthcare records with a service he launched called MyMedicalRecords.com.

Source: http://www.score.org/pdf/HP_Download_ImpactofDisaster.pdf