Business Continuity Planning for Data Centers and Systems: A Strategic Implementation Guide

Chapter 4. Flooding: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!

One of the first questions users or tenants have been trained to ask during the site selection process is: What parts of the asset's land are within the 100-year floodplain? Is the candidate's property on an area of frequent and documented flooding (regardless of source)? The question is a good one, but it is misleading. To the layperson, it implies that a flood occurs once in a 100-year period. Since the useful life of an asset is generally 13 to 20 years, siting a data center within the 100-year topology almost sounds like a safe bet, right? Wrong!

Here are a few things that these tax/topography maps and data do not consider:

• The roads, highways, and airfield to access the asset may be partially or entirely impassable due to flash floods, tidal surge, still water, high winds, and fallen trees.

• The services that feed the asset may be under water. These services include:

  • Utility substations

  • Telecom central office

  • Power (buried)

  • Telecom fiber/copper

  • Generator plant

  • Buried fuel/water

  • Buried facilities to asset

• Hundred-year storms occur far more regularly than stated and should be treated with a high level of seriousness.

The second misleading statistic or data point is the 500-year topology or flood rings as indicated on tax maps, by the Federal Management Emergency Agency, and others. Unless the data center ring or topology sites the landing point of Noah's Ark, this ring should be fairly high above sea level, but it is not. The line delineations ...