Storm knocks out some county computers, communication lines for 2 days

County officials were still dealing Thursday with technical problems in the aftermath of Tuesday's thunderstorm. Lightning strikes damaged office computers at the Cape Girardeau County Courthouse in Jackson and satellite feeds at the county emergency operations center, and knocked out a few communication lines.

The damage was nothing out of the ordinary for a "good thunder-and-lightning storm," said Eric McGowen, the county's information technology director.

Day-to-day operations suffered at the courthouse in Jackson as a result of a reported two lightning strikes on the building, effectively disabling all the computers in the circuit and associate court clerks' offices, Circuit Clerk Charles Hutson said.

In addition, air-conditioning units in Associate Circuit Judge Gary Kamp's courtroom, printers in the prosecuting attorney's office and fax machines in another office in the courthouse were also damaged during the storm.

Hutson said several calls were made to authorities in Jefferson City about the computer system, which is state-maintained, but as of Thursday afternoon it had not been repaired.

Two deputies transported two boxes of court files to the courthouse in Cape Girardeau to enter them into the computer system there, but staff in the clerk's office has been unable to make any docket entries in Missouri Case.net or their own system in Jackson for the past two days, Hutson said.

Any work on the jury selection system has had to be delayed until the computers are fixed, and staff have been making temporary payment receipts when someone comes to the courthouse to pay their court fines, "so it creates a problem," Hutson said.

Most of the problems at the emergency management center were taken care of by Thursday, but satellite feeds from weather services were still out on all but one monitor, said emergency management director Richard Knaup.

"All in all, in the grand scope of things, we were very lucky," said Knaup, emergency management director for the county.

In addition, a Charter communication line for the county was down temporarily, leading to problems with the paging circuit in remote sections of the county, McGowen said.

Other paging arrangements were made so no area of the county would be without responders from area fire departments while the line was down, Knaup said.

McGowen said the problem was fixed around 5 p.m. Thursday.

bdicosmo@semissourian.com

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