Why do we allow a storm to bring the market down?

Since the rise of electronic trading, the stock and related markets seem to me to be nearly identical to other network services. Amazon.com and Google do not allow a single weather event or earthquake or whatever to disrupt normal operations.

The standard way of doing this is to set up distributed data centers in geographically stable but widely separated places. Why can't we have this for our markets as well?

 I speculate that it may be the illusion that the fading market makers have that their personal involvement is required for the functioning of the markets. One official was quoted "we could have opened the electronic trading markets but didn't want to endanger our employees who have to be present to run it." Clearly if you have one data center in New Jersey, one in Chicago, one in Seattle and one in Hawaii this won't happen.

Yes, you will lose the femtosecond response you're getting from being right next to the New York data center, but so will everyone else. Until power is restored, anyway. (I enjoyed Scott Patterson's book Dark Pools on the rise of electronic trading, which got me thinking about this.)

Comments please!