County fixes IT problems three months after December windstorm
Taoseños won’t soon forget the December windstorm that knocked out power and utilities across the county — in some cases for several days. Along with causing hiccups in electricity and internet for more than 4,000 county residents, businesses (including Taos News) and government agencies were also affected, with internet problems continuing for some.
While many of the affected businesses, the Town of Taos and Taos Pueblo have since had their IT (information technology) problems fixed, the administration at Taos County is still experiencing issues three months after the storm.
Silva explained the reason for the most recent outage was a broken repeater (or a tower that transmits a signal from one location to another) on the roof of the county complex. He explained that all of the off-site county buildings work off a “point-to-point” system, with buildings like the sheriff’s office, the senior center and the EMS headquarters all running off the system from the county complex. “It’s like a large version of a modem,” he said.
To fix the problem, Silva said they ended up running services through existing fiber optics to the sheriff’s office. “We put a server or some switches to allow it to be a standalone network,” he explained. “Right now, the department is on its own two feet. If there’s any disruptions on any point-to-point system, they will
never be affected.”
They are still restoring the point-to-point system “as a redundant network” in case there are any issues with the fiber optics. A third party IT contractor helped them solve these issues, said Silva.
When asked about the county’s in-house IT department, Silva said he had no comment. “As policy we do not comment on personnel matters,” he said. “We at the county are working diligently to ensure that our network infrastructure is working effectively, so we may provide services to the residents of Taos County.”
Continued internet outages at the county complex have affected commissioners’ email servers, the Taos County Sheriff’s Office Spillman system (the department’s online record system for all things public safety) and the EMS billing department. However, according to Deputy County Manager Jason Silva, the problems had been fixed as of late last week.
While the IT issues persisted, Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe said his office experienced intense interruptions in their day-to-day operations. “We adapted to using old school paper documents to maintain a functional operation the best we can,” he said.
“We literally lost everything. Civil process that comes in — subpoenas, orders of protection, things like that from the courts — our normal process is we enter those at the end of each day and they’re ready for service the following day. We weren’t able to do that,” he explained, also noting the phones (which run off the internet) were down; the central reporting system was down; and they did not have access to their “home drives.”
“Then when we lost our copying and scanning ability, we were having to go to other places to make copies, or just handwriting the information on notepads.” Thanks to help from administrative and office assistants, he said they have been able to enter the handwritten notes into the computer as the system comes back online.
“I’ve been in law enforcement since the days of a typewriter. When I first started, we did handwritten crash reports. For me, it was a grin… for others, not so much,” he joked.