Have there been any statements from Istock about the flooding Calgary?  Any hiccups today?  100,000 have been evacuated in Calgary, especially from downtown and many communities without power.   Looking at mapquest, (1240 20th Ave SE, Calgary AB I think is where they are) they look like they are at least 12 blocks from the Bow River - but how low is their land?  I logged on for the first time in months, the website appears to be working.  (Everything happens at Istock on Fridays doesn't it!)

Even row 10 of the Saddledome is under water!   The poor people in Banff are landlocked, all the highways are washed out.

their last tweet welcomes 2 new video exclusives, nothing on the flood

The poor people in Banff are landlocked, all the highways are washed out.

There are few places in the world I wouldn't mind being  be forced to stay...Banff is one of them... Love that place

Hoping that everything is OK for all my family and friends in the area.

Any word on their neighborhood Les?  Hopefully just precautionary.  I bet you are worried!  And isn't Stampede 2nd or 3rd week in July?  Although, I'm sure no one is thinking about Stampede right now though - but I wonder how many people are planning to arrive in Calgary from all over the world in the next couple weeks!   

My cousin is city police and she said there were a lot of rescues last night that could have been avoided.

And grsphoto, yeah, Banff would be a sweet extended stay... except it must be the most expensive town in the Province, we've never stayed for long.  $15 hamburgers are a cheap lunch in Banff.....

Sorry you likely have to be signed into Facebook to see this video, but look at the river just stealing trees!  Someone in the post said that each tree on Memorial Drive was for a soldier who lost his life in first ww.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151564816986026&set=vb.176351929083336&type=2&theater

Hopefully iStock has a crash recovery site with a real time mirroring server running in another city at least 100 miles away from their main server site which is standard protocol for large companies who depend directly on the internet for their total revenue. This way, if their main servers were to be flooded or ever go down in Calgary, they could at least be up and running again from the crash recovery site in minutes with the flip of a switch.

But then again iStock can't even get their Connector program working correctly to mirror images from iStock onto the Getty servers in New York. They have been working on that for a year or two and it still doesn't work right, if even at all most of the time.

On second thought forget the possibility of an iStock crash recovery site operating elsewhere. Even if one exists, its probably never been tested, and if it has been tested they are still working the bugs out of it I am sure.

Perhaps we should all prepare ourselves for something like this: http://www.istockphoto.com/503

They talked about that a couple (few?) years back when istock was hit with a major snowstorm that shut them down for a few days, but don't know if it ever happened.

Hopefully iStock has a crash recovery site with a real time mirroring server running in another city at least 100 miles away from their main server site which is standard protocol for large companies who depend directly on the internet for their total revenue. This way, if their main servers were to be flooded or ever go down in Calgary, they could at least be up and running again from the crash recovery site in minutes with the flip of a switch.

But then again iStock can't even get their Connector program working correctly to mirror images from iStock onto the Getty servers in New York. They have been working on that for a year or two and it still doesn't work right, if even at all most of the time.

On second thought forget the possibility of an iStock crash recovery site operating elsewhere. Even if one exists, its probably never been tested, and if it has been tested they are still working the bugs out of it I am sure.

Perhaps we should all prepare ourselves for something like this: http://www.istockphoto.com/503

Theoretically a disaster recovery site is "standard procedure", but it takes a helluva lot of serious money, time, and testing to get your IT systems to the point where you can just "flip a switch" and make that work.  I've yet to work at a company that has managed it (and I mean companies that rely on the internet for revenue), although I do know of a few through colleagues.  Mostly big league finance places however, and the likes of amazon, ebay, google.  The fact is, disaster recovery is a major investment and iStock may have decided that the money they would lose being down for X amount of time (a day, a week, who knows) is less of a loss than the money and time they'd plough into a disaster recovery site.  That's a perfectly valid cost/benefit analysis.

Or, and more likely in my experience, they do have some form of DR site, but it's far from fully functional and would take hours to move to, see above re time and money needed to make the DR site perfect. 

Also, their servers may not be anywhere near their registered office so this whole point could be moot.

At least the worst seems to be over for Calgary, so sorry to hear about the deaths though.  Can't DR a person :/

They are not able to reverse a minor (buggy) change when it happens. How could they recover a full crashed website??

 

all seems well though? (apart from the lack of PP, which is a concern - 24 June, and nothing!)

As always these threads end up with people being more worried about their own $$ instead of the disaster hitting these people in Calgary.

A proportion of contributors has its own anxieties, like bills to pay etc. Not negating the suffering of a portion of iStock's staff, it's just confounded if other people can't pay their important bills on time. (NB, I'm not in that group, nor am I in the PP)

PP would certainly be affected if employees can not get to work.  The office may be closed still.  I have not watched the coverage in a couple days, but the mayor had said he was uncertain of one transformer, and that one neighborhood may be without power for weeks or months.  Maybe it's been inspected and resolved - not sure.  If I have the location right, it looks like Istock is just across the tracks from an evacuation zone that is still red.  The City itself is still under a State of Local Emergency.   A lot of workers would presumably live close to the office - so, many may still be misplaced.  If homes were flooded they would busy ripping out dry wall and not thinking about PP. 

I agree, it would be nice if they would make a statement though.

The images and videos from Calgary are just terrible. I live in a city that gets floods every few years, but we have never had anything like what they are experiencing in Calgary right now. I hope all the people we know are safe and their homes are undamaged.

Floods are terrible, they also leave all kinds of dirt and debris afterwards and the mix of dirt and chemicals can dry to become as hard as concrete and very difficult to remove. And of course the walls and foundations of a home can be so severly damaged, that you need to pull down the whole building.

Canada is a modern country so they certainly have resources to give people professional help, but a flood like this makes people homeless, ill and can destroy many smaller businesses.