**insert 90s Geocities “under construction” animated .gif here**

Thanks again to our sponsors listed under the LAN section, we couldn’t have had as much fun without you!

Szudera Insulation has been a client of Applied Intellect for years. In June of 2004 a fire completely destroyed the entire building. The offices were the original starting point of the fire and were totally incinerated. Decades of client records, paperwork, blueprints, everything was reduced to ashes overnight. Because of the size of the fire the firemen dumped tens of thousands of gallons of water into the building. What wasn’t completely incinerated in the blaze was destroyed by the flood.

The next day Jerry (the owner of Szudera) called Chris Boden at AI. Jerry has been a supporter of The Geek Group since we were in Grand Rapids and AI has done all of their computer work for as long as we’ve been in business.

Chris grabbed some gear and hopped in the car with a couple AI staff members and headed up to Grand Rapids for a look at the situation. The building was falling in on itself and Jerry was making setting up temporary offices across the street in some office space he had rented out that morning.

The goal was to find the computers in the rubble and see if the hard drives could be extracted. Hard drives are rather delicate when subjected to physical abuse, and the three worst things to subject a hard drive too are of course, Shock (like having debris fall on a computer or hitting it with a fire hose and blast it across the room), Heat ( for instance setting the computer on fire), and Water. Even if the computers could be found in the mess, saving the data was a long shot. We didn’t even know if the computers were intact, much less where they were anymore. Everything was jumbled around and the offices were on the bottom floor originally. Now there was 3 upper floors caved in on top of them.

Chris went into the building, debris and sludge everywhere, and after an hour found the first computer. Only 20 minutes later he found the second. They looked like this.

All of the plastic had melted, the computer on the left was directly in the blaze while the one on the right was under a desk and though it escaped most of the direct contact with fire, it has spent the night in over a foot of water.

Things did not look good.

Before he even left the building, Chris began working on the computers. Since we didn’t need the cases, we decided to remove the hard drives on site. Chris did this standing inside the burned out building using an old Steelcase desk that survived the fire.

Here’s the hard drives. Chris kept the melted floppy as a souvenir. It sits in his office to this day on a shelf as a reminder of the adventure.

After the physical recovery of the drives, they were placed in static bags and put in a padded case for transport back to the labs at The Geek Group. The drives were cleaned and installed in a test computer one at a time.

After 4 days of work on rebuilding the drives (one had several failed solder joints that melted in the heat), every single piece of data was recovered from the drives.

The entire job saved Szudera tens of thousands of dollars in lost records and years of client and employee archives.

Chris built them a a pair of new computers right away and had them installed on site and working perfectly in their new offices.

Jerry and his team are still rocking out with insulating pipes to this day.