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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Damn. The powers that be better do something about this fast. SF is about one of the last places in the US to develop new things.

Heck just a temporary prolonged outage of Google alone would have huge negative consequences for the US (not to mention the world). Amazon AWS US west is in Northeren California. I wonder how big the negative effect will be on just how many companies?

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The "City" of San Francisco (though it does contain a big chunk of the tech industry and houses many of it's employees) is not the whole "Silicon Valley".

Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Y-Combinator, Stanford, Yahoo, etc are all located in the South Bay and (may or may not be, the article doesn't specify) affected by the fires.

Don't know about the power grid, but about half the water supply in Mountain View comes from local wells, so it would not be as affected as SF, but part of the rest comes from Hetch Hetchy, so there could still be problems. Not sure if local resources get reallocated in emergencies.

http://www.valleywater.org/Services/CleanReliableWater.aspx

Most people think hackers don't have good personal hygiene skills anyway, so I think those companies could skate for a little bit if push came to shove...

Most of the 'Silicon Valley' cities get at least some of their water from the Hetch Hetchy system.

This report is an economic scenario analysis, and estimates the probable effects on the Bay Area economy of a major failure of the San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s Hetch Hetchy water system,

http://www.bayeconfor.org/pdf/hetchhetchyfinal2.pdf (map on pg 4)

> SF is about one of the last places in the US to develop new things.

Don't believe your own hype. It's bad for you.

This sort of thing is EXACTLY WHY both Google and Amazon have datacenters all over the world.

Sure, except us west is only in NC and many businesses aren't likely to shift availability zones.

If you host a site that needs five nines or whatever in only one availability zone, it's your own darn fault.

Is there a sim where I can go an blow these places up in a simulator, eg anti terrorist training ?

anti terrorist training? I suspect these simulators aren't more commonplace precisely because they may be accused of being training software for terrorists.

If you mean "cyber-blow-up" there's https://www.sans.org/netwars/cybercity

I've no idea if it lives up to its own hype.

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