“We currently have Microsoft working with our database trying to get it restored right at this moment.”

That was Sergeant Ron Gordon of the St Joseph Police Department Support Services Division Tuesday morning. Gordon, along with a large team of computer geeks, have been working for the last week and a half to restore the database server that shares data between law enforcement and firefighters within the city and Buchanan County.

As we told you last week, a pair of unrelated incidents led to some major problems in the computer network that supports those functions.

A fire in the Uptown area destroyed some coaxial cable providing connectivity to a broad cross section of emergency service providers in St Joseph.

Just hours after the network was restored, the hard drive on a database server crashed, corrupting the database.

That second calamity forced officers, deputies, firefighters and paramedics to revert to the pen-and-paper methods of decades past.

“We had to issue safety goggles along with the pens, for all the people that had forgotten how to use them,” quipped Captain Matt Rock of the St Joseph Police Department. “We’ve been working without case numbers, and without access to records since the outage occured, and now we’re doing things the old-fashioned way.”

Sergeant Gordon says the team working on the problem includes members of the Support Services Division, the software vendor, the city’s network administrator, Hewlett Packard and Microsoft.

“We were able to recover some very recent backups, from several days before up to and including our outage last Wednesday,” Gordon said.

“We were able to possibly restore, hopefully, our database up to a very recent point, and then smaller backups that happen we should be able to catch up to within an hour and a half or so of our outage.”

Gordon is still hesitant to predict when the effort will end, but he was hopeful Tuesday morning.

“I hesitate to give a timeline at this point,” he said.  “We’re going to try to get things up and running before the long weekend starts so we can keep from getting farther behind and having to do more catch up work.”

Gordon says they’ll get the most out of the current equipment, but says they can now justify the expense of a backup server to prevent this problem from happening again.