Shorefront Connecticut Town Incurs Data Failure

The beach in Greenwich, CT has been in the news over the years for local efforts resisting out-of-towners who visit the beautiful shorefront park. But now an embarrassing data crash connected to the beach is making headlines.

Some 11,000 applications for renewing the coveted beach access cards were lost this weekend after several hard drive failures hit the affluent town’s municipal computer network, according to a report from The Greenwich Time.

There is an effort to restore data, but the system has to be rebuilt “from scratch and it will take some time," Boris Hutorin, the town’s IT director, told The Greenwich Time.

Some 5 terabytes of data were eliminated. Fortunately there was no breach of local tax or financial records.

The Parks Department said it had 15,000 records “compromised,” which The Greenwich Time says means data entered by the Parks Department since Feb. 27 can’t be recovered.

Both temporary workers and full-time staff are now on overtime pay to sort through hard copies of the data that disappeared, the newspaper reported.

The municipal golf course will take reservations for tee times manually, the source added. Passes for the beach are required after May 1, according to the town Web site, and fees are charged for non-residents. 

Worse still, warm weather started early this year in Connecticut and may lead to more residents opting to enjoy the beach or golf course.

As the first hard drive was replaced on Sunday, a second hard drive failed, town officials told The Greenwich Time.

While the city continued to derive solutions, one Greenwich Time reader (NumbersMan) posted a comment on the newspaper’s website, saying in part, “You've got to be kidding me. No backups of important data? What is the Town's Disaster Recovery plan? Crossing their fingers and hoping they don't have a disaster? Hard drives fail. It's a fact of life. Didn't that occur to anyone?”

Related reports by TMCnet indicated that the websites of comedy pundits Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert also crashed earlier this month, naturally making the news.

TMCnet reported on March 1 that other Viacom (News - Alert) websites, including the main Comedy Central website and some stories on MTV.com, were indeed affected as a result of a data center equipment failure.