Board of Commissioners try to find out how the Register of Deeds office can stay in operation when the computers go down. | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

Answer: Spend more money.

    The Beaufort County Board of Commissioners meeting in its regular monthly meeting Monday (8-6-12) heard from Register of Deeds Jennifer Leggett Whitehurst. The issue being discussed in the video below is how the Register of Deeds Office responds to emergencies, specifically when the computer system used for recording legal documents goes down.

    Recently the system went down for a couple of hours and deeds and other documents could not be recorded. What you hear is a "head this off" presentation by Ms. Whitehurst and her response is to tell the board how much money needs to be spent to solve this problem.

    To understand this issue one must know that the time a legal document is recorded sometimes makes all the difference in the world in legal transactions. Before the advent of computers the documents were hand stamped by a clerk in the office and the date and time printed on the document. With computers that information is automatically recorded by the computer. But when the power goes off or the computer system goes down the computer cannot record the correct time the documents were actually processed.

    Ms. Whitehurst's solution is to buy and maintain electronic back-up systems. Commissioner Hood Richardson questioned why the recording process could not be done manually, as it had always been done until the electronic systems were back up and operating.

    We'll leave it to you to decide whether he got a satisfactory answer.

    In a brief interview after the meeting Richardson explained that this two-hour incident is but a wake-up call for the County. "There is a need for legal documents to be recorded on time regardless of the electronic system. If the electronic systems go down we still need for business to be transacted the way it is supposed to be done. The time a document is recorded can make a world of difference in certain cases. When they propose to solve the electronic problem by buying redundant electronic systems I have to wonder if we're not taking the wrong approach. It seems to me that if the computer goes down you revert to the old manual paper system until the computer is back operating and then you enter the information into the computer system, recording the information as if there had been no disruption in the system in the first place," he said.

    Commissioner Stan Deatherage, who runs a computer company, suggested that off-site backup storage as proposed by Ms. Whitehurst was extravagant.

    As you will hear in the discussion, the request for more equipment was referred to the Information Technology Committee for study and a future recommendation.



    Commentary

    We are interested in this issue simply because we face the same issue every day. To maintain our website we have backup systems in the even the primary system goes down. We also understand the need to store our information offsite. Just this past week we had to revert to our backup system to handle the deluge of visitors to our site to read the Chick-fil-A stories. Our main server crashed within thirty minutes of posting one of the Chick-fil-A stories when it went viral on the Internet. We had to switch to the backup server for two days until traffic returned to normal. They we had to update our primary server with the information we had entered during the time we were using the back up system. It too about seven seconds to synchronize the two servers. We'll be interested to see how the County solves its very similar problem.

    What we are more concerned about is the issue Mr. Richardson raises about a catastrophic failure, either of the phone system or the power grid system. If either of these system goes down the issue becomes: Can the County continue to function. Battery backup as Ms. Whitehurst describes is not a practical solution to the catastrophic failure Mr. Richardson raises.

    Hood pointed to the problems in India just this week when millions of people were without power and internet/phones for days. We think he raises a very significant issue. Are Beaufort County residents not going to be able to transact business during such periods?

    We'll keep you posted.

    And check back for more reports from the meeting.