Power Shutoff Continuity Checklist for LA

Most Southern California businesses have a continuity plan. Very few have ever run it — and those are not the same thing. If you want to be ready for power shutoff season, you do not need a bigger plan. You need a tested one, and testing it takes an afternoon.

Ninety seconds on the three checks. Watch it on YouTube, or take the written version with you — the SoCal Business Continuity Checklist is free and needs no email address.

A Power Shutoff Is Not an Emergency

This distinction matters more than it sounds, because it changes what you should be preparing for.

A public safety power shutoff is scheduled. It is announced in advance, communicated by the utility, and in most respects it is the opposite of a surprise. What makes it difficult is not that it is sudden — it is that it is entirely outside your control, and it lasts as long as it lasts.

That means the failure mode is not panic. It is paralysis. Staff arrive at the office. The phones do not work. The files are somewhere, technically. Two people stand near a dark conference room display trying to decide whether to send everyone home, and neither is certain who gets to make that call.

Nothing about that morning is dramatic. It is simply an expensive, avoidable day.

What "Tested" Actually Means

When we say a plan has been tested, we do not mean somebody read it. We mean the organization has answered three questions out loud, with names attached, on a day when it did not matter.

1. Sequence: What Comes Back First?

Not everything has to come back at once. This is the part most plans get wrong: restoration gets imagined as a single event, so it gets written as a single event, and then on the day it turns out half the systems depend on the other half and nobody wrote down the order.

Decide the order in advance. For most businesses it is some version of:

• Identity first — almost nothing else authenticates without it.
• Communications second — you cannot coordinate a recovery you cannot talk about.
• Revenue systems third — the one or two things that actually bill, ship or serve customers.
• Everything else — in whatever order is convenient.

Your order may look different, and that is fine. The point is that an order exists, it is written down, and it is not being invented at 7am in a dark office.

2. Location: Where Does the Copy Live?

A backup that shares a failure domain with the thing it is backing up is not a backup. It is a second copy of the same risk.

The test is a single question: if this building loses power for three days, can you still reach the copy? If the answer involves walking into that building, you have your answer.

This is rarely an expensive problem to solve. It is very often an unexamined one, because the backup job runs, it reports success every night, and success reports are reassuring right up to the moment they become irrelevant.

3. Rehearsal: Has Anyone Actually Run It?

Here is the uncomfortable one, and the step almost everyone skips.

Reading a plan tells you the plan exists. Running it tells you whether it works. Those produce completely different information, and only one of them is useful on the day.

A rehearsal does not have to be elaborate. Put four people in a room on an ordinary Tuesday. Say: the power is out at the main office, it is out until Thursday, go. Then watch what happens.

What you are looking for is not a smooth performance. You are looking for the pauses. Every pause is a decision nobody had made yet, and every one of them is cheaper to find on a Tuesday than on the day. In our experience those pauses are almost never technical. They are questions like:

• Who decides that we are working remotely?
• Who tells clients, and what do they get told?
• Does whoever answers the phones know what to say?
• If the outage runs past Thursday, who makes the next call?

Those are not IT problems. They are the reason an IT plan does not survive contact with a real outage.

Why an Afternoon Is Worth It

The businesses that come through a shutoff week well are almost never the ones with the most sophisticated infrastructure. They are the ones where somebody spent an afternoon, once, being slightly bored in a conference room, arguing about what comes back first.

That afternoon is the entire difference. Not a bigger plan. A tested one.

If you want the broader picture beyond shutoff season, our disaster recovery planning guide covers how the same thinking applies to outages, hardware failure and ransomware.

Who We Are

Pro Link Systems has provided managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud and disaster recovery to Los Angeles businesses since 1999, from Woodland Hills. Our help desk is in-house, US-based and staffed 24/7 — when you call, a person answers. There is no phone tree and no hold queue.