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Cass County Communications disrupted Oct. 22nd – cause unknown

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October 31st, 2016 by Ric Hanson

Cass County 9-1-1 Director Rob Koppert, today (Monday), updated the County Board of Supervisors on some recent good news and bad news. The good news, he said, was he received funds from the Iowa Communities Assurance Pool, or, I-CAP.

Koppert said he received $1,000 last Friday from ICAP for a fire extinguishers grant to supply extinguishers for the courthouse and other vital County buildings. The funds will be used to reimburse the County for the already paid for and received extinguishers. The extinguishers cost around $1,300-$1,400 altogether, and Koppert said he would look into using funds from the County E-911 membership to make up the remainder of the costs for reimbursement.

The bad news, Koppert said, had to do with numerous County communications systems. An incident happened that happened the night of Oct. 22nd took down the internet and other vital systems affecting the courthouse and Communications Center.

A dispatcher on-duty texted Koppert, who was in Iowa City at the time. A couple of minutes later, he was notified the County’s radio communications system was down. Koppert said there was no reason they could find or think of that would have caused both systems to crash. The Avaya phone system was also down in the courthouse. 9-1-1 was not affected, however, because the Administrative lines are run to the Comm. Center. At that point, Koppert instructed the dispatcher to active the phone tree method of communication to emergency responders.

Cass County Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Kennon was also notified, and responded to the Comm. Center in a coordinated effort with Koppert, to try and figure what was going on and walk through the check-list of steps to correct the problem. A radio tech from Indianola was also called to try and get communications up and running, and Solutions, Incorporated was called to deal with the internet issues.

Early the next morning, the efforts resulted in the internet “WatchGuard” firewall security system being reset in the basement of the courthouse. Koppert said one of the Watch Guards apparently went into a “Kernal panic” mode, which occurs when there is an issue with either system hardware, OS, or firmware. It’s taken by an operating system upon detecting an internal fatal error from which it cannot safely recover.

Koppert says there are plans in-place to have a back-up radio in the Comm. Center, and having someone on-site, available on short notice, to handle similar situations.