Who turned the lights off?

Thousands of homes and businesses in central London had to face extended power cuts as temperatures soared in capital at the end of July.

Engineers from the power group EDF worked through the night to restore supply, but the effects of the power outage caused extensive problems for many businesses.

The failure was attributed to four unrelated faults which triggered cuts in the group's power distribution in the West End of London. While the faults were not thought to be weather related, EDF issued a series of announcements asking users with supplies to reduce the pressure on the network while repairs were effected. Offices in the area and traders along Oxford Street and Regent Street were forced to close in the absence of Business Continuity plans when the shutdown wiped out IT, tills, lighting and air-conditioning systems. Oxford Circus Tube station, one of the busiest in London, was closed for almost an hour and a half and big name shops were among those forced to close temporarily.

Jace Tyrrell, spokesman for the New West End Company, which represents businesses on Oxford Street and Regent Street, said it was too early to say how much money had been lost to the power cuts but many restaurants and small traders lost considerable amounts of refrigerated and frozen stock and hundreds of companies in the area ground to a halt. "This is bad news for business and bad news for shoppers in the West End," he said. "We are very disappointed on behalf of businesses. It is even more disappointing for shoppers who turn to stores to escape the heat."

The glitches, two at substations after a power cut on Sunday and two unrelated faults on underground cables, interrupted supplies to three separate blocks of EDF customers during the day.

For a number of years the issue of power supply has been an increasing concern for Business Continuity professionals, as experts in both Government and the power industry warn of increasing disruption to the network. As this example illustrates, the consequences of power failure immediately stops normal activity in most businesses and as many of the retailers will testify, the financial impact should not be underestimated. Retailers accustomed to using card authorisation terminals found they could not process transactions and that they had no manual back system.

This event also showed not just our dependency on power, but the lack of business Continuity planning undertaken to deal with power failure. The TV and Radio channels in the area were awash with news reports from angry businessmen, all criticising EDF, but none mentioning how their BCM plans had helped. Although supplies were restored after extensive work, the clamour for compensation became the story and this then evolved into discussions about the profitability of EDF and effectively became an attack on the company itself.

Throughout the event owners and directors of the businesses affected poured vitriol on the supplier for their 'failure'. Yet we wonder: just how they would cope if they had a crisis that affected their customers? Would it all have been resolved in less than 12 hours? Would the emergency plans previously mapped out have functioned as well? I think not. Not one of the comments reported reflected the responsibility that each of those affected had to themselves to plan for disruption to their business. The adage 'failure to plan is planning to fail' once again held true. From our extensive research POWER Failure is a consistent top 3 cause of serious events and often triggers a cascade failure amplifying the initial impact.

Many of the businesses in the area thought that everything would return to normal once the power had been restored, but returned to find data had been lost and systems requiring extensive work to restore business as usual. It certainly seems as though most were quick to blame EDF for the failure, but the reality is that much of the impact would have been avoidable if BCM measures had been in place for the organisations affected. Even (and I could argue especially) small businesses need to recognise simple and relatively inexpensive investment would go a long way to mitigate the impact.

Effective use of the web and home working would have maintained much of the office based workers productivity, a bit of thinking and training on manual back up systems for processes such as card authorisation and other critical tasks could have helped retailers continue trading, and some level of service could have been maintained by restaurants, had they considered back up generators to protect chilled and frozen stocks. None of these need cost much, and on the day of power failure would have proved their worth, and as part of a proper BCM process would cover other eventualities as well, compounding the value! BCM is not just for big organisations, it is for all organisations and SME companies, as they are almost inevitably the most vulnerable, particularly need to plan for disruption or else face the very real risk of catastrophic business failure.

The Continuity Forum has been very active across the country promoting BCM though both our public sector and 'Secure in the Knowledge' events and we'll be continuing this work with our various partners over the coming months. There will also be a new series running in London, Birmingham and Glasgow in October looking at BCM and technology for SME's.

The Continuity Forum team is available to assist technology companies deliver or support BCM events and workshops. For more details on these activities and the general activities of the Continuity Forum please contact us directly on +44 208 993 1599 or visit or website at www.continuityforum.org.