BUFFINGTON: About the fire

Mainstreet office manager, Debbie Castellaw, was out for an early morning jog before work when shop foreman Garnett Smith called her to report smoke in our building in downtown Jefferson. He'd called the fire department.

Running toward her house, Debbie called me and said she would get to the office as soon as she could. I threw on some boots and took off in the Jeep, hoping the traffic enforcement guys were not on the road at that moment.

By the time I arrived, the situation had calmed down a little. The Jefferson Fire Department had found the source of the fire — a microwave in our upstairs break room had caught on fire during the night and that burned part of a cabinet it was sitting on.

But the room was sealed and once the available oxygen was burned up, the fire fizzled out. When the fire department arrived early Thursday, the microwave was cold, the fire having died several hours earlier.

That was a good thing, but the mess left behind and the root cause of the fire created much bigger problems.

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As the JFD left the scene (Harrisburg, Arcade and JCCI departments also responded), our electricians began testing circuits to see if they could isolate what happened and if there was additional damage anywhere. The microwave shouldn't have just suddenly caught on fire in the middle of the night.

On top of that, as we turned some breakers back on, outlets in the building would pop and the breaker would throw off. Something wasn't right and while lights and some equipment seemed to work, not everything powered up.

It didn't take them long to figure it out — many of our outlets had readings of 208 volts rather than the normal 110 volts.

That extra "hot" voltage was creating problems and had been why the microwave burst into flames.

The cause of the higher voltage?

Last Wednesday night, crews had worked on a power pole and transformer behind our building. We knew they would be there — they'd notified us and had waited until we completed the Feb. 8 editions before they shut power off to the building to do their work.

Unfortunately, when they reconnected lines, they pulled a higher voltage line into the building rather than the normal one (I don't know the technical terms, so excuse my condensed phraseology here). The result was to overload our circuits with too much voltage and the microwave got a strong enough burst to catch on fire.

But a burned-up microwave was the least of our concerns. Newspaper production is heavily dependent on computers — what had that high voltage done to the various computers and servers in the building?

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And then there was the soot. Everything throughout the building was covered in a fine layer of black soot. It was (and of this writing still is) a mess. The air really wasn't good to breath and you couldn't sit or touch anything without getting covered in the soot.

And what about those computers? In addition to getting hit with the power surge, they had been sucking in black soot through their cooling fans.

As I said earlier, the situation was a mess both physically with the soot and practically with computers that may or may not work enough to get this week's issues produced. (Fortunately, our printing press is on a different power line coming into the building so it was spared any electrical damage. And we weren't the only business hit with problems. I understand our next door neighbor Jefferson Drugs also had some electrical-related damages.)

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So for the past week, we have been confronted with two large (and many smaller) problems: Where could we work since our building is uninhabitable due to the soot and  cleanup crews doing their work; and how could we work if the computers were fried or suspect?

Fortunately, the first problem got solved quickly by one of Jackson County's leading businesses. Jackson EMC, whose headquarters are in Jefferson, graciously allowed us to use a room in their corporate office to work from until we can get back into our building. 

Jackson EMC really, really saved the day for us. (By the way, Jackson EMC wasn't the company that overpowered our electrical circuits.)

Like most businesses, most of our work is done via the internet. Everything from banking to receiving news, ads, obits, legals, classifieds, etc. is mostly done by computer and online systems. That was another issue to resolve in all of this.

So for now, much of our office work is being done out of a room at Jackson EMC. We hope to get our building cleaned soon so we can move back in, but that all depends on how quickly the cleaning happens. Likely, we'll move back in stages.

A big thanks to Jackson EMC for helping us out during this crisis.

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While we have a temporary home, the status of our computers is another matter.

Fortunately, a lot of our staff, especially our news staff, now work from home. During the Covid pandemic, we transitioned to a more home-based workflow. Our reporters have laptops and for the most part, cover their events and meetings, then log into our central server and upload their stories and photos.

Alex and I are now working out of our Homer office where we have good internet (kudos to Gumby Communication in Toccoa which dialed up our internet speed this week in Homer to make remote work possible.) 

Our news server system also ties into our advertising and billing systems and into our page production system. All together, we run about 5 different servers that make producing newspapers, mailing them, paying bills, making payroll, etc. all work.

One of those servers died earlier this week. It ran for a while after the fire, but on Monday, it went down, creating a workflow headache.

It's probably just a matter of time before other servers and workstation computers also start malfunctioning. 

Part of that is probably due to the sudden power surge, but it's also due to the soot that filled the building after the fire. Soot is produced when a fire burns incompletely, as happened with the microwave. And unlike dust, soot, which is tiny carbon particles, is often ionized and is very sticky. Think of how a chimney looks on the inside after a few fires in a fireplace, black with soot.

Some of the soot is visible, but it's also microscopic and gets into small spaces, like computers (and lungs.) 

The upshot of all this is this: While some of our computers are working, it's probably just a matter of time until they begin to die. That means we will have to replace all our computers and servers, even those not directly hit by the soot or surge. Newer computers have newer operating systems and for all our complex and proprietary software systems to work, everything will have to be upgraded so that it will all work as it should.

That's a lot of computers, monitors, backup power units, printers, servers, etc. We're a small business, but everything we do depends on this technology working correctly and without failure.

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So for the next few weeks, we hope you'll be patient with us as we work through all the problems create by the fire and power surge. There may be some delays in people getting back with you, or you may see some different looks in our papers as we transition from our existing computer hardware to all new hardware. How quickly that will happen isn't yet clear.

Meanwhile, we'll continue to cover our communities with the usual vigor, keeping you informed about what's happening in your back yard.

And to tell the truth, it's a little odd to write this about a "news" incident that happened at the newspaper office. We like to put the focus on others and not ourselves, but with this event, we thought our readers would like to know what had happened and how we're working through it.