By Carolyn Reid
FALMOUTH — For city hall, the Feb. 23 power outage is the outage that will not go away.
Power was out in the entire city for about 13 hours.
When city hall staff returned to work Feb. 25, they discovered that the outage had “fried,” in Mayor Luke Price’s words, two of the three servers that run city hall’s computer system, including for billing utilities customers.
Monthly utility bills, which usually are in mailboxes of city residents by now, still have not been delivered.
“Our utility and accounting software is inoperable and not capable of producing utility bills, posting payments of any kind, or accessing customer or vendor accounts,” City Clerk Susan Bishop said.
Not even the prompt action of calling in VC3, the service provider, was enough.
An engineer was called in last Tuesday, and he determined the power outage caused the servers to go down, but he could not determine if it was a power surge or something else that brought down the city’s essential services.
Thursday evening, Price said one server was up, “halfway, at that,” and while they were in the works replacing those servers, they are also taking the opportunity to upgrade protections in hopes of keeping a similar situation from happening later.
Price could find some good news in the mix. Other city services that rely on computers, such as the police department, were not affected. The city still has email, even if it is limited. Most importantly, all information is backed up, so it will be available after repairs are made.
Meanwhile, the city continues playing a waiting game.
The city expected new servers and partselivered Monday afternoon. Technicians were ready to install once the parts were in.
Utility bills will be sent after that.
LATE FEES WAIVED
Since bills will go out late, Price said city residents would not be penalized for late payments.
“We will waive late fees and disconnects this month. That is for the whole utility bill and not just the electric portion,” Price said.
The grace period will only extend for one month,
“Come April, the bills needs to be current for all utilities,” he said, noting that the grace period will not extend past March.