Some of you may have noticed that we haven’t posted any mug shots from Buchanan County for nearly a week. That’s because we haven’t received any.

We asked Buchanan County Sheriff Mike Strong if there was a technical problem.

“There’s a BIG technical problem,” Strong said.

There were actually two, unrelated, problems that have forced law enforcement, firefighters, and other officials to revert back to “old school” methods.

“We’ve had a lot more pens checked out from our Admin office over the last few days,” said St Joseph Police Sergeant Ron Gordon, who works in the Support Services Division. “We’ve gone a lot more to pen and paper.”

“The good thing for the citizens is this really does not affect our level of service with them. It simply affects the flow of information between the departments and internally. It has not affected public safety at all.”

The problems began Saturday night with a fire near 13th and Powell. Inspectors with the St Joseph Fire Department believe the fire was deliberately set, because all of the utilities had been turned off, and a witness described a suspect in a grey sweatshirt running from the scene. The fire destroyed a detached garage.

It also burned through several telephone lines, and the coaxial cable that delivers Suddenlink’s cable, telephone and Internet services.

“As a result of that fire, it disrupted data communication between City Hall and the Law Enforcement Center, and between City Hall and the Parks Department,” said the city’s network administrator Paul Flurry.

“Because we monitor those things fairly closely, we understood pretty quickly there was something wrong. We found out it was a more systematic disruption, rather than something at either end,” Flurry said. “Our good friends at Suddenlink got on the job fairly quickly after that.”

That connectivity issue also affected ambulance service at Heartland Regional Medical Center.

Connectivity was restored by Tuesday at about noon. But then another major computer glitch happened, which has yet to be repaired.

“At about 5:45 Wednesday morning, officials at the Law Enforcement Center discovered that their database server was down. That server supports record-keeping, computer-aided dispatch services, jail management, and mapping. When they replaced the file server, they discovered that their database had been corrupted.

So far, they have employed the talents of the Support Services Division, the Network Administrator Paul Flury, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft. Gordon says he doesn’t want to rush the process of repairs, and doesn’t want to say when things might return to normal.

“Getting it fixed is like watching paint dry,” he said.