One week ago, we experienced one of the worst things that can happen to a company – a fire broke out in the ShowOffice Breukelen where BSL is located. Thankfully no-one was hurt, but the impact for BSL has been considerable – our offices were left unusable. Our first goal was to get servers/services up and running for our customers as quickly as possible. Our calamity plan worked, so we succeeded!
Fire in the ShowOffice Breukelen
Last Thursday morning, a fire broke out at around 11.40. The fire started just below our offices on the first floor, and was caused by an electrical fault. The building was evacuated safely, but the fire had serious consequences for BSL. We lost electricity for a while, and the office itself suffered a great deal of smoke damage.
Despite this, we had our support site and servers up and running again within just a few hours of the fire starting. And because the smoke damage meant we couldn’t work in our own office, several of our team moved with their laptops to the nearby Van der Valk that afternoon. We straightaway sent all our customers an email informing them about the situation. And for anyone trying to reach us by phone, we arranged for a temporary telephone service to take all calls. If any of our customers with support contracts called with an urgent problem, these would be put in touch with our engineers via their mobiles.
Contingency plans
Although we hoped they’d never be needed, we naturally have contingency plans in place for such an emergency. BSL’s servers are located underground in a protected, fire-proof room for instance. This meant we could quickly restart them as soon as the electricity supply was restored, only 1.5 hours after the building was evacuated.
What’s more, our engineers can work remotely if necessary. They don’t need to sit at their BSL desks! So while a start was made on the office clean-up on Friday, BSL’s programmers carried on working uninterrupted, making sure all our projects remained on schedule. And in the BSL offices themselves, specialist companies were busy working through the weekend, making sure part of the office space would be usable again by the start of the week. Sure enough, on Monday morning, most of the team was back at work in Breukelen. ‘Business as usual’ – just as we’d promised our customers.
This quick restoration of services didn’t go unnoticed by our customers. One of them wrote “My compliments on how quickly you had your servers up & running again.” And we’ve received many, many other messages of support too, from customers and suppliers alike. We really appreciate all the kind words and the understanding – it definitely helped…
You can rely on us!
Despite such an unexpected setback, we’re proud to say that BSL has come through it all with flying colours! We’ve shown that customers can always count on us. That we meet our commitments. Because reliability and good service are key elements in BSL’s approach to doing business. We’re proud too of our team, and how they dealt with the challenges and disruption they faced last week. In other words, thank you to everyone. BSL is up and running again!
