In the aftermath of the Dec. 11 ice storm that left the town without power for just over a week in some areas, local businesses that didn’t depend on communication to function made out fairly well, while those that did had to scramble to continue operations.
Becky Hill, manager of the Harvard branch of Rollstone Bank and Trust, told the Press that although three of the bank’s seven branches lost power during the storm, the Harvard branch did not and was shut down for only one day, Friday, Dec. 12. She said the bank doesn’t have a specific disaster-recovery plan, and that if her branch had lost power, it “would have just shut down until the power came back.”
Surprisingly, there was little damage reported to local orchards as a result of the ice storm. Both Stephanie Green, of Westward Orchards, and Frank Carlson, of Carlson Orchards, said that the fruit trees were able to withstand the ice because of their stature. “Fruit trees are short and well-pruned,” said Carlson, and as a result aren’t top-heavy. However, both Green and Carlson reported damage to deer fencing around the orchards, as a result of other, larger trees such as oaks falling onto the fences.
Carlson said his farm was without power for three and a half days, resulting in a loss of some retail business. He added that the farm was also short of help, because employees coming in from hard-hit neighboring towns were unable to get to work. The storm also put the farm behind in cider production, he said, because they were unable to get to some of their apple suppliers. Apples in cold storage weren’t affected: “Those storage rooms will keep for a week without power,” said Carlson.
The Westward Orchards store was without power for six days, Green said. Before they were able to get two borrowed generators going, they lost frozen goods and produce due to spoilage. “We saved what we could,” she said. The two generators borrowed from friends were put to work maintaining the apple storage area and powering key parts of the farmstand.
Businesses dependent on communication were more challenged by the utilities outages. Sally Steele, of Thompson-Steele Production Services, said the company lost all communication capabilities for a week. The Brown Road book-production company depends on e-mail, phones, Internet service, and a data transfer website to communicate with customers. Steele said she spent some time at Starbucks in Acton, downloading files to a laptop computer. Although it was a trying week, Steele said clients were very understanding. “We didn’t suffer from it,” she said.
However, Steele learned an important lesson about the company’s communications capabilities: “Everything was tied to Charter,” she said, adding that she plans to move some services to another provider, to avoid putting “all the eggs in one basket.”
Have newspaper, will travel
The Harvard Press is another business that is highly dependent on electronic communications. The deadline-driven weekly newspaper receives nearly all content by e-mail, does all editing and layout electronically, and transmits the final version to the printer via a file transfer protocol (FTP) site. The Littleton Road office lost power sometime during the evening of Thursday, Dec. 11, and on Friday it became clear that the outage could be prolonged.
The Press had no specific emergency plan, but friends came to the rescue. On Sunday, Dec. 14, the Press learned about space that might be available in Acton. Around 9 a.m. Monday morning, owner Worth Robbins received the go-ahead to locate the Press’ operations at the temporary site until Wednesday at 5:30 p.m., and by 1 p.m. he had made one trip there, set up some equipment, and confirmed that it would work. By 3 p.m., Robbins had moved and installed a router and Ethernet switch, a server, three other computers, two printers, and a power strip with battery backup.
With the temporary operation set up and running, Robbins and his wife, Sue, got back to “business as usual,” working until 5:30 p.m. Monday laying out ads for the Dec. 19 paper. On Tuesday the two were joined by co-owner Lisa Aciukewicz and the editor, and all went through the normal Tuesday deadline drill. On Wednesday the team laid out the paper and uploaded the final proof to the printer by 5:30 p.m.
Robbins said that although luck was with the Press in finding temporary work space and successfully relocating and installing equipment on short notice, it wasn’t part of a formal disaster-recovery plan.
He added that there were lessons learned that will be incorporated into a plan the paper will develop to ensure uninterrupted operations in the event of another calamity. One had to do with phone service. Robbins said he was unable to move the phones, because the service was through the local Internet provider, which by Friday, Dec. 19, had still not restored service to all Harvard locations. He said he plans to look into voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) technology, which allows phone connections over any broadband Internet connection.
On Thursday, Dec. 18, another friend made some space available at a Devens business, which Sue Robbins used to upload the week’s content to the Harvard Press website—the last step in the weekly get-the-paper-out process.