County web site goes down

Whitman County returned to the World Wide Web Tuesday after a week and a half absence.

The web site clicked out of order Nov. 6 after two hard drives failed. They were part of a series of hard drives that contains a database of information for the web site.

Chris Nelson, county information technology director, said the drives likely died from the wild weather patterns that brought in cold temperatures and hard rain over that weekend.

“In my experience, even in a climate-controlled area, when hard drives die it’s because of wild weather changes,” said Nelson.

Nelson said her staff tried to recover all the lost data from the dead hard drives but could not.

That means job announcements posted on the web site cannot be accessed, and neither can the daily log of deputy calls posted by the sheriff’s office.

Auditor Eunice Coker said she had to extend the application deadline for the new finance director position in her office because of the web site crash.

In restructuring the duties of the former finance department, which was dismantled after the termination and resignation of its top two officials in June, commissioners moved the annual statement and budget preparation under Coker’s authority. On July 19, they gave her the authority to hire a new employee to perform those tasks.

She advertised the position and has since received three applications, two of which she said were “very promising.”