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San Diego Wildfires: Business and Government Systems Keep Running Despite the Disaster

By Steff Gelston

October 23, 2007 — CIO — For Qualcomm CIO Norm Fjeldheim, it’s been anything but a typical working week. On Monday, Fjeldheim became one of the more than 250,000 San Diego area residents driven from their homes by the fiercest set of wildfires to ravage Southern California since 2003.

“I became concerned on Sunday night,” says Fjeldheim. “I was watching the news closely and monitoring e-mail. I was scheduled to fly to San Francisco yesterday, which I canceled. My neighborhood was evacuated at about 10:00 [on Monday].”

Fjeldheim and his family – four people and two dogs – are now camped out in a downtown San Diego hotel, watching the news and following the latest developments in the fire, which has been burning for three days and has destroyed at least 1,000 homes and 100 businesses, according to news reports.

Yet despite the fire, Fjeldheim and Qualcomm were both on the job yesterday. The CIO says all systems are up and running at the San Diego-based maker of wireless communications devices and software. “There have been some intermittent power issues because of the fires, but so far none of our systems have been impacted due to the backup systems we have in place,” he says.

In part, that’s because Qualcomm has an “Operations Readiness” team in place to respond to emergencies and IT is a part of that, says Fjeldheim. The team has been in place for many years: it was originally formed to deal with Y2K in the mid-1990s. Its scope was later expanded to handle all disaster preparedness and responses for Qualcomm.
While Qualcomm’s main IT facilities were not threatened by the fires as of Tuesday morning, Fjeldheim said a number of outlying buildings in the evacuation zones were being closed down as a precaution. All Qualcomm’s systems and buildings can be monitored remotely, which Fjeldheim and his team have been doing for the past 36 hours.
But with media outlets putting the number of area evacuations to as many as 500,000, the ability to communicate with employees is critical, especially when it comes to keeping workers alerted to office closings in potential danger zones. To deal with such an event, Qualcomm has multiple communications systems in place to notify its employees. “We have extensive Remote Access Systems (RAS) in place,” says Fjeldheim, “enough for up to 10,000 employees.” And with staff needing to work remotely due to the blazes, “we can also support a very large number of conference calls for employees,” he adds.

 

 

 

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