Vandals Blackout Dartford, Crayford, Bexleyheath, Erith and Orpington

Serious vandalism resulted in the loss of electricity supplies to thousands of customers across the Dartford, Crayford, Bexleyheath, Erith and Orpington areas. The fire was started by vandals interfering with major power cables and at the peak of the incident around 92,000 customers were without power.

DSI were one of the 45,000 customers in Crayford, Erith and Bexleyheath that had access to some power for three hour periods on a rota basis. Some businesses and homes were without any power for four days.

Fortunately we had invested in a UPS with adequate battery backup which meant that our critical systems stayed live and there were no corruptions to any of the data on the disks from power surges and power flickering on and off.

Unfortunately over the next few days the power was allocated on a rota basis and three hours a day was not enough to recharge the UPS batteries.

Businesses today have become reliant on email and web access and the loss of these services can seriously affect business and profitability, never mind full loss of IT back office as well.

It was imperative that as an IT company DSI were able to restore services as soon as possible so after hiring a generator we were up and running with full IT and some office service restored.

We look at tragic incidents like 9/11 or other disasters around the world and never relate them to our own business and the issues that result from them.

DSI were one of the lucky businesses in our area to have made provision for business continuity.

Most of the SME businesses in the area were not as prepared.

Ask yourself this, does your business have the right protection in place to cope with a complete loss of power?

And if it doesn't, what are the potential implications to the business?