I was working at a data center in the financial district during Sandy. That was quite the experience. For whatever reason, our building was one of the last to have power turned back on. We never had to move diesel by hand fortunately. We did have a fun moment early on where one of our generators needed to have most of its load reduced for a few minutes. There were a pair of external fuel filters that needed to be changed fairly frequently. They were meant to be redundant so you could change one at a time. By the time we were able to get a tech on site, they were so dirty that when we started switching to just one the generator came very close to stalling out. After some conversation we thought it was thought that if we could drop the load enough we should be able to get away with just one dirty filter for a short period of time. The only chance we had at that was to shut down all of our cooling units. The generator was on the roof, and I was coordinating the timing over radio. You could dedinitely hear the generator wasn’t happy, but it worked. As soon as the second filter was replaced I let everyone know it was time to turn all of the cooling units back on. No one responded, and after a pause I realized that meant that probably no one had heard me and things were getting hot fast. I sprinted back inside. On the way my radio dropped, so once inside I sprinted to all of the units to tell people to turn them back on. For some reason I didn’t think about grabbing someone else’s radio. That may have been a lucky mistake though, as I’m not sure what all of those compressors turning at at the same time would have done.

I had made sure to observe the filter replacement process in case we needed to do it again ourselves. We did, and the next time someone recorded me doing it so everyone could learn and we handled most I’d the rest of the swaps from then on.

There were a lot of memorable experiences that week or so.