Sunday, September 5, 2010

Canterbury Earthquake - free emergency help available for businesses without email

What a weekend.

I was out in central Christchurch until 11:30pm on Friday night for my wife's birthday, and then 5 hours later the parts of town where we'd been were under a pile of rubble after Saturday morning's 7.1 richter scale earthquake. (#eqnz and #nzeq on Twitter). It was an incredible jolt and went on for nearly a minute (felt longer!) - but due to the time of day, amazingly there have been no fatalities. We have been so lucky. My kids have been progressively calming down as the severity and frequency of aftershocks have reduced steadily over the weekend. We're still getting regular jolts, but hopefully that's the worst of it over.

The Civil Defence, Police and volunteers seem to have done a superb job of managing the crisis - mayor Bob Parker in particular has been excellent in the media: competent and empathetic.
After a few hours during Saturday morning without electricity and water, normal utilities have been restored to most areas of the city and things are past the initial emergency reaction and into a second phase of damage assessment.

At Memia, we currently have no access to our offices in Cashel St due to the emergency cordon, but our team will be working online during the first few days of the week at least. Also, Tuesday is the Software Summit at the Grand Chancellor hotel - currently happening as planned, to my knowledge.

One item in particular: if there are any businesses which are without email and other IT systems due to the earthquake, we're here to help. If you need an emergency solution for your business email (eg to your team @yourdomain.co.nz), we can get email flowing again usually within hours implementing Google Apps standard edition. If we can help out just get in touch 027 344 6808 and there's no charge. (You will need access to your DNS records).

So - I'm looking forward to getting Christchurch up and running again. Hopefully the Twisted Hop is still standing as well! ;-)

3 comments:

Ben said...

Our good friend @miramarmike at @WaveAdept in Wellington is offering a similar rescue package for Canterbury businesses: see http://waveadept.com/2010/get-canterbury-email-flowing-free-rescue-package/

Good on you guys. Also, Nik the good chaps at MinuteDock (http://www.minutedock.com ) are offering a month's free subscription to Canterbury customers - again, thanks guys!

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