I'm sorry to hear the bad news on that. Are they not hosted in a professional network operations center? I'm guessing they are not based on this, as data centers are built to be hurricane and earthquake proof and have back-up generators and back-up servers.
For a basic forum site like that, he could get hosting for $10 / month and avoid this problem.
I hope I don't sound insensitive, but this is an example of why you don't keep the server in your house just because you think it's cool to do so.