The computer network at the St Joseph Buchanan County Law Enforcement Center are up and running again.

Police Sergeant Ron Gordon of Support Services says they were able to return to normal operations at about 4:20 p.m. Thursday, more than a week after a fire and a hard drive failure knocked out the network.

“We were able to get our system back to where it’s operational,” Sergeant Gordon said. “Currently, we’re only entering new information, as we’re assessing our data-recovery and seeing what needs to be caught up.”

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

Wednesday’s outage was caused by a hard drive failure. Four days earlier, a fire near 13th and Powell burned through some coaxial cable, knocking out network connectivity. That problem may, or may not have spurred the later hard drive failure.

Firefighters, sheriff’s deputies and police officers have had to take and file reports long hand, with pen and paper, since the outage Saturday.

Gordon says they’re now looking at how much data must be entered into the rejuvenated system. They’re also looking into ways to prevent this from happening again, including the possible purchase of a redundant file server.

“We are expecting to analyze our need on that, and make some decisions on what kind of presentation we need to make in order to get some redundancy for that,” he said.