Storm Short-Circuits City Hall Server

A sudden summer storm that swept through Olney damaged the City’s computer server and knocked out three of four air-conditioning units at the Olney Civic Center, leaving officials scrambling to restore services and facing unexpected expenses as they head into budget season.

Mayor Rue Rogers said the storm appeared with little warning two Sundays ago, bringing high winds that caused problems at several City facilities.

The most immediate disruption came at City Hall, where the storm damaged the City’s aging computer server beyond use.

“The server down at City Hall has been very old and something we need to replace,” Mayor Rogers said. “Sometimes when they go offline, you can get them back up pretty quickly. But this one just completely fried it.”

When employees arrived Monday morning, the failure initially left City Hall without working phones or email and without access to files stored on the server.

Mayor Rogers said City Administrator Andy Wolfe and City Secretary Tammy Hourigan were in “triage mode” Monday morning, working to restore basic services. Phones, email and the systems needed to accept payments and conduct other transactions were operational by mid-morning.

The City is working with its Wichita Falls IT contractor to restore access to files and other information stored on the damaged server.

The outage also forced the cancellation of the City Council’s July 27 meeting because documents needed for the meeting could not be accessed.

“There’s nothing that is super time sensitive on Monday,” Mayor Rogers said he told City staff. “Let’s cancel Monday’s meeting on the 27th, and let’s just focus on taking care of citizens.”

The Council is scheduled to meet again Aug. 10.

Mayor Rogers said maintaining working air conditioning at the Civic Center is particularly important because the facility serves the community during emergencies, including as a warming station.

City officials also are dealing with air-conditioning problems at the Senior Cub Center, where meals are served to senior citizens and the Meals on Wheels program operates.

“We’ve gotta have AC at both of those,” Mayor Rogers said.

The timing puts the unexpected repairs squarely into upcoming City budget discussions. Olney’s fiscal year ends Sept. 30, and Mr. Wolfe already is meeting with department heads to prepare the next budget.