Yeah, basically some sort of amateur hour effort to preserve between $90 million and $180 million of cores. I wonder how much it would have cost to do it right?

Edit: of course I'm being naive, and hindsight is always wonderful, but the total cost for a backup would be perhaps $100k/year?

Take 5 minimum wage, no benefit people. Some of these might be called "retirees". You need 5 to cover the 168 hours in a week. Or maybe you employ some starving "students", of which there is a nearly infinite supply nearby.

Sit one down in a chair. Tell him, "sit here, read books, surf the internet. Every 5 minutes look up and see what the temperature is. If it's higher than -35, call this list of people".

Seriously, I wonder why we don't take more advantage of humans in situations like this. In years past it was often routine to have humans present 24/7 at critical sites.

My experience is that people don't do well when asked to monitor systems that rarely change for rare events. It doesn't matter how strongly you impress upon them the importance of the work or how much potential reward you dangle in front of them the monkey part of their brain will pull them from the task.

This is a common enough problem that it's a well understood factor in systems failures and has been extensively explored in literature with airline pilots, nuclear technicians and TSA X-Ray techs as human factor in engineering.