North America, 2012
Q. What happens when nature takes a hand and causes the biggest power outage in nearly 30 years?
A. It depends. That was what investors discovered at their expense recently when large parts of Midwestern North America were affected by the biggest coronal mass ejection (CME) to reach Earth since 2001.
CMEs – solar flares of such power that they eject superhot clouds of gas into space – can block radio communications and trigger phantom commands capable of sending satellites spinning out of their regular orbits. They can also cause power failures - as millions of people learned in March of this year when cities all around the Great Lakes found themselves in the dark for over 24 hours. Private homes, public buildings, and businesses, from Minneapolis to Rochester and from Cleveland to Toronto, were without power from 9:22 am on Wednesday 4 March until lunchtime the following day when power began to be restored.
Two financial institutions with very different infrastructure strategies found themselves executing disaster recovery programmes for real when the lights went out. The different approaches they took provide some interesting lessons.
Please note: the characters, businesses, corporations and events portrayed in this article are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead, or existing legal entity, is merely coincidental
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