Wildfires Don’t Just Threaten Buildings. They Threaten Business.

The devastating wildfires around Spokane, Washington are another reminder of how quickly a natural disaster can disrupt an entire community.

Evacuations. Power outages. Road closures. Inaccessible facilities. Damaged infrastructure.

For businesses, the question isn't simply whether your building is protected. It's whether your organization can continue operating when you can't access it.

The Failure Modes Wildfires Actually Cause

It's easy to picture wildfire risk as "the building burns down," but the more common — and more disruptive — scenarios are less dramatic:

·       Preemptive power shutoffs. Utilities in fire-prone areas increasingly cut power proactively during high-risk conditions, sometimes for days at a time, even in locations nowhere near active flame.

·       Evacuation without damage. A mandatory evacuation zone can make a facility completely inaccessible to staff for an extended period, even if the building itself is never at risk.

·       Smoke and air quality shutdowns. Extended periods of hazardous air quality can force facility closures independent of any direct fire threat.

·       Network and connectivity gaps. Fires can damage utility infrastructure — fiber lines, cell towers, substations — well outside the immediate burn area, disrupting connectivity for businesses that were never in danger themselves.

Each of these can take a location offline without a single piece of hardware being damaged — which means the fix isn't just "protect the equipment." It's making sure the business doesn't depend on any one location being reachable at all.

What Business Continuity Actually Means for IT

A real continuity plan for wildfire risk (or any regional disaster) generally comes down to four questions:

1. Where does your data actually live? If your backups are stored only on-site, a facility that becomes inaccessible takes your backups with it. Offsite and cloud-based backup, replicated to a geographically separate location, is the baseline — not a nice-to-have.

2. Can your team work from somewhere else? If critical systems, phone lines, or point-of-sale infrastructure are physically tied to one location, an evacuation order becomes an operations-halting event. Cloud-hosted systems and remote-access infrastructure turn an evacuation into an inconvenience instead of a shutdown.

3. What's your actual recovery time? Every continuity plan should have a real answer to "how long until we're back up" — not a hope, a tested number. That means actually running the failover, not just documenting that one exists on paper.

4. Who fixes it, and how fast? When a regional disaster hits, support demand spikes across every affected business at once — which means response time depends heavily on whether your maintenance and support contracts were built for exactly this kind of surge, or whether you're competing with every other business in the region for the same limited technician pool.

The Part Most Continuity Plans Miss: Hardware

Data backup and cloud failover get most of the attention in continuity planning, but physical infrastructure is just as often the actual bottleneck to recovery. A data center with fire or smoke damage, a network switch that took a power surge during an outage, a security system that needs to come back online before a location can reopen — these are hardware problems, and hardware problems need a support plan that doesn't assume "normal" conditions.

This is exactly where having a maintenance strategy that isn't solely dependent on OEM lead times matters. When a regional disaster hits, OEM support queues get long fast — parts get backordered, technicians get spread thin across every affected client at once. A maintenance plan built around faster response and dedicated support (rather than competing for OEM bandwidth during the exact moment when everyone needs it) can be the difference between reopening in days versus weeks.

Building the Plan Before You Need It

The businesses that recover fastest from a regional disaster aren't the ones with the fanciest infrastructure — they're the ones who tested their plan before they needed it. That means:

• Confirming backups are actually offsite and actually restorable, not just scheduled

• Knowing exactly what would happen to phone systems, POS, and network access if a specific location went dark

• Having a support relationship in place that's built for rapid response, not just standard-hours coverage

• Reviewing this plan annually, not just when a disaster is already in the news

Wildfire season isn't going away, and neither is the broader trend toward more frequent, more disruptive regional events. The businesses that treat continuity planning as a standing priority — rather than a reaction to whatever disaster is making headlines that week — are the ones that reopen fastest when it's their turn.