2025 Flooding Events Highlight Need for Strategic Site Selection and Disaster Preparation
If you’ve observed that recent heavy rain and flooding throughout the Middle Atlantic seems to fit a larger pattern in the US and worldwide you are correct.
The tragic floods in Texas have understandably received the lion’s share of the attention but The Washington Post reported that the first half of July had 1,203 reports of flooding in the US, nearly the double the usual annual count of 653 for the time period. This year has seen the National Weather Service issue a record number of flood warnings. Eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York City in Eastern Pennsylvania were recently hit hard.
The Middle Atlantic has been getting peppered by intense rainfall in recent years, with five of New York City’s most intense rainstorms in their history taking place over the last four years, all with storms that also impacted Philadelphia. NYC’s two most intense hours of rain in history have both been within the last three years, and those of us in the IT infrastructure space are aware that in the previous decade New Jersey and New York had a passel of flooding-related data center outages.
The tragic results of many of these flooding events have been far worse than data center downtime. But as keeping IT infrastructure up and running is our mission, that’s what we are discussing here, and data center uptime can impact personal well-being. Our region’s 911 call center and other emergency services infrastructure is housed at Direct LTx, so our ability to stay up and running improves health, well-being, and first-responder capabilities.
Many reading this will remember the widespread data center outages resulting from Superstorm Sandy in 2012. More recently, the remnants of Hurricane Ida knocked our area for a loop in September 2021. Center City suffered historic flooding (see the photo above) and many companies highly dependent on their IT infrastructure suffered significant downtime when they discovered they were not as resilient and redundant as some of their fiber and other IT service providers had led them to believe.
Unfortunately, data center flooding risks will continue for the foreseeable future. In an article entitled Climate Threats to Data Centers Set to Surge DataCenterDyamics highlighted the work of European climate analyst organization XDI. The 2025 Global Data Centre Physical Climate Risk and Adaptation Report evaluates over 22% of data centers as either high risk or moderate risk to weather events, projecting that risk pool to increase to 26.7% by 2050. The report judged New Jersey as the highest risk data center state.
With better than a one in five (and rising) chance that your data center is flood prone, the time may be right for a reevaluation of the risks you face in your current IT infrastructure. Direct LTx is a highly connected, rock-solid, Tier III data center with a history of high availability that is situated 84 feet above the 500-year flood plain. Whether for production or disaster recovery, our data center 60 miles west of Center City Philadelphia is well-positioned to withstand weather events. We’d welcome the opportunity to discuss your needs and give you a tour. Email strategy@DirectLTx.com for a conversation about your specific requirements.