Many of you may already be familiar with the general Darwin Awards, where "The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it..." In this fine tradition, Webtorials now has the "Darwin Awards for Disaster Recovery" by Gary Audin, Delphi.

The idea for the paper came about when we were discussing the upcoming Webtorials Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) State-of-the-Market Report with Gary, and we realized that the only thing that tops learning from your mistakes is learning from the mistakes of others.

And while this is a "finished" paper, we actually see this as an on-going project as we collect your further nominations for Darwin Awards both specifically for BC/DR and in general for IT and telecommunications.

As an example of one of the candidates discussed in the paper, "A data center with many computers on multiple floors was designed with a diesel generator system for backup power. The system was tested successfully for three years. Finally the power was lost. The generator would not start. The generators on the first floor depended on fuel tanks in the basement. Without electrical power, the fuel pumps did not work. Fuel cans had to be carried to the first floor to start the generator to start the fuel pumps to keep the generator working."

In another case, "A manufacturer installed a VoIP system without PoE. The cost of UPS was beyond their budget. The emergency communications plan called for the installation of CENTREX phones to be located in all the conference rooms. When there was a power failure, the conference room phones could be used. Finally a power failure occurred. The conference rooms had no windows and no one had installed backup lighting. With the lights out, the employees had to hunt around for flashlights to locate the CENTREX phones in the dark."

On the serious side, though, these stories highlight the need for planning for the non-technical as well as the technical side of a robust BC/DR plan. And even though we normally try to offer suggestions that will save you time and increase your efficiency, we take no responsibility if you spend too much time reading about the traditional Darwin Awards.

In a few weeks, we’ll be returning to this discussion after you've had an opportunity to share your stories at the links above.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.