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Water damage disrupts Clark County computer systems

Water leaked into server room at CRESA building

By Tyler Graf
Published: October 7, 2014, 5:00pm

Water damage brought down Clark County servers for more than two hours Wednesday afternoon, disabling websites and email service.

The damage was discovered around noon in the server room at Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency, 710 W. 13th St. in downtown Vancouver.

CRESA Director Anna Pendergrass said infrastructure services servers for her agency, Vancouver and Clark County went down, but it’s unclear whether every server went offline. The outage also affected the Center for Community Health and the Clark County Courthouse.

Service returned at around 3:15 p.m.

Critical systems, such as 911 dispatch, defaulted to a backup system, said CRESA emergency manager Scott Johnson. Calls to 911 were not affected by the difference in service, he said.

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Services provided by the county online, including those for the county’s Property Information Center, were also down, meaning some services couldn’t be processed for customers.

The website for Clark County government also was down as a result of the water damage.

The water leak occurred after a backup in a sewer line caused a valve to close and resulted in water being released from a ventilation system, county spokeswoman Mary Keltz said.

County crews were alerted to the leak when sensors in the server room detected the presence of water. Crews shut down the servers before they were damaged, Keltz said.

Server disruptions are rare but not unheard of. The county has procedures in place to address outages quickly so they don’t worsen.

“We have had similar situations that have required an emergency response from the staff,” Keltz said. “The primary cost will be in labor, which is already budgeted.”

A county plumbing team had to snake a device 150 feet into the sewer pipe to dislodge the blockage.

The website for the city of Vancouver also was temporarily down, as its traffic runs through a shared server at the county.


Stephanie Rice contributed to this story.

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