By Angie Brunow, Senior Project Manager
The Midwest flooding has been devastating to many individuals and businesses who call this area home. Mercy Medical Center, one of Geonetric’s’ clients, was no exception.
As the rising flood waters began to approach the hospital, Mercy Medical Center used every possible channel, including their Web site, to communicate with the public about the impact of the local crisis on their operations. That is until early Thursday morning when Mercy’s server - and their self-hosted Web site - lost power. Mercy contacted Geonetric and we immediately stepped in to lend a helping hand.
We arranged Mercy’s DNS to be pointed at Geonetric so that we could display an HTML page that notified visitors that www.mercycare.org was experiencing technical difficulties. We then transferred the hosting of their Web site to Geonetric - our IT staff and developers worked as fast as they could to build a database and prepare to move the Web site to our production server.
The next obstacle was getting a current copy of their Web site. This brought on another challenge - the site was too large to easily ftp the files to Geonetric, so they saved it on a flash drive at Mercy. Unfortunately, Mercy was starting to take on water in their parking ramp and many Mercy employees were busy sand-bagging alongside hundreds of community volunteers. So, I drove to Mercy to pick up the flash drive. Being able to see, first hand, the hospital and the city being overcome by river water was mind blowing.
By the end of the day, we helped Mercy restore its Web site and it proved to be an invaluable communications tool that evening as the hospital made the difficult decision that the rising flood waters required patients to be evacuated. Mercy began to use their Web site homepage to provide evacuation updates and directions to employees and volunteers, and they have continued to keep it up-to-date with information and photos.
We applaud Mercy for their online disaster recovery and crisis communications efforts - they have done an exceptional job in connecting with their many audiences: employees, patients and their families, visitors, the local and national media, and thousands of concerned community members. Geonetric was happy to be able to assist our client in need.
June 19, 2008 at 8:46 am
[...] J.Sanderson wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptAs the rising flood waters began to approach the hospital, Mercy Medical Center used every possible channel, including their Web site, to communicate with the public about the impact of the local crisis on their operations. … [...]
June 19, 2008 at 9:24 am
We at Mercy can’t even begin to thank everyone at Geonetric for their prompt support in getting us live again. It’s truly made us value our partnership and the Web as a communication tool during times of crisis.
June 24, 2008 at 1:26 pm
[...] Medical Center, who at the height of the flood had to evacuate all their patients. You can read the blog post of how we worked with them during that event. What hasn’t been shared is a conversation with [...]