Essay ·
Five years on: what the water taught us
Our co-founder on the week in October 2012 that started this company, and why we measure everything we build against a line on a wall.
Five years ago this week I was carrying five-gallon cans of diesel up a stairwell in lower Manhattan, because the fuel pumps that should have lifted it to the generators on the upper floors were in a flooded basement. So were the switchgear, the fuel tanks and most of the things a building needs to keep its tenants running. Many of those tenants were networks. When they went down, a good deal of the region went with them.
Elena Castellano, who designs flood defenses for a living, spent the same week watching water go where her models said it would, past buildings that had not asked her. We met a few months later and found we had drawn the same conclusion: the problem was not that the water came, but that nobody had decided, in advance and in numbers, where it would stop.
That is what we built Cordgrass on. Every critical system in SEC1 sits above a line we can name, at an elevation we can show you on a drawing, and we test the things that keep the water out. There is a mark on the old loading-dock wall at SEC1 where the 2012 water reached, 8.6 feet above the datum. We kept it. We measure everything against it.
Paul Ferenczi, co-founder and chief executive
Cordgrass Data · Secaucus, New Jersey · October 30, 2017