We were four minutes late with our last news page this morning.
I couldn't be happier, or more relieved.
At about 5:15 a.m., just as reporter Brian Gray was leaving the building to get donuts for the newsroom, the entire building went dark. The power had gone out.
Our computer servers were still working, its lights blinking and processors whirring. The whirring and warning beeps that the servers were working on limited, reserve power were the only sounds. Some 15 or 20 minutes later, the servers went to sleep.
Seeing that we were less than four hours away from needing to have a paper completed and transmitted to Janesville for printing, we had to figure some things out. Obviously, without power there was going to be no paper. There was no immediate news from Alliant Energy about how long it would be until power was restored to the portion of the city's West side that had gone dark.
I consulted our company's "Emergency Plan." Department heads were called to alert them to the crisis.
E.N. Hughes Co. had a backup generator in town. It was going to be brought to the office as soon as we had an electrician lined up to handle the connections. Gentz Electric was called. They were without power, too, but had a team at the Times within minutes.
Thankfully, we didn't have to consider how to power a press to print papers. The Times now is printed in Janesville.
So the task was to get power from the generator to three newsroom computers - the minimum we determined we needed operating to get the paper completed. The servers also had to be powered, along with two computers in the advertising design department. The rest of the building would remain dark.
We later determined we'd also need to get power to our phone system, to allow us the Internet access to retrieve overnight obituaries and to send pages to Janesville.
As the work began, the team leader from Gentz learned that Alliant planned to have power restored within an hour. It was 6:45 a.m. We already had determined we'd need to be up and running by 7:30 a.m. to have any hope of getting pages completed and to Janesville by our 8:55 a.m. deadline. We asked Gentz to proceed, figuring it was better to have two potential sources of electrical solutions than just one.
We still had 10 of 16 pages to complete - six of them from scratch. If power was restored, everything worked right, and the stars were aligned, we could get that work done in about an hour and a half. While the building was dark, we established a gameplan for which local stories we'd get in today's paper and which ones time and space wouldn't allow. We set goals for how much time to spend on remaining pages.
Just as Gentz was finishing its feverish work to get power to the necessary places, the lights turned on throughout the building. Alliant Energy had restored power, at about 7:15 a.m.
The server still needed to boot back up and run, and there were complications. It was another 20 minutes before it was working, and the newsroom was able to access news pages, stories and photographs.
That gave us about an hour and 20 minutes to get stories read and pages completed. We'd lost almost two and a half hours of time.
And I had all the confidence in the world that Jim Winter, Brian Gray, Tere Dunlap and Jean Woodruff in the newsroom, and Jaimie Tran and Judy Crooks in the ad design department, could get it done.
And we did - about four minutes late, but certainly close enough.
Whew.
I couldn't be happier, or more relieved.
At about 5:15 a.m., just as reporter Brian Gray was leaving the building to get donuts for the newsroom, the entire building went dark. The power had gone out.
Our computer servers were still working, its lights blinking and processors whirring. The whirring and warning beeps that the servers were working on limited, reserve power were the only sounds. Some 15 or 20 minutes later, the servers went to sleep.
Seeing that we were less than four hours away from needing to have a paper completed and transmitted to Janesville for printing, we had to figure some things out. Obviously, without power there was going to be no paper. There was no immediate news from Alliant Energy about how long it would be until power was restored to the portion of the city's West side that had gone dark.
I consulted our company's "Emergency Plan." Department heads were called to alert them to the crisis.
E.N. Hughes Co. had a backup generator in town. It was going to be brought to the office as soon as we had an electrician lined up to handle the connections. Gentz Electric was called. They were without power, too, but had a team at the Times within minutes.
Thankfully, we didn't have to consider how to power a press to print papers. The Times now is printed in Janesville.
So the task was to get power from the generator to three newsroom computers - the minimum we determined we needed operating to get the paper completed. The servers also had to be powered, along with two computers in the advertising design department. The rest of the building would remain dark.
We later determined we'd also need to get power to our phone system, to allow us the Internet access to retrieve overnight obituaries and to send pages to Janesville.
As the work began, the team leader from Gentz learned that Alliant planned to have power restored within an hour. It was 6:45 a.m. We already had determined we'd need to be up and running by 7:30 a.m. to have any hope of getting pages completed and to Janesville by our 8:55 a.m. deadline. We asked Gentz to proceed, figuring it was better to have two potential sources of electrical solutions than just one.
We still had 10 of 16 pages to complete - six of them from scratch. If power was restored, everything worked right, and the stars were aligned, we could get that work done in about an hour and a half. While the building was dark, we established a gameplan for which local stories we'd get in today's paper and which ones time and space wouldn't allow. We set goals for how much time to spend on remaining pages.
Just as Gentz was finishing its feverish work to get power to the necessary places, the lights turned on throughout the building. Alliant Energy had restored power, at about 7:15 a.m.
The server still needed to boot back up and run, and there were complications. It was another 20 minutes before it was working, and the newsroom was able to access news pages, stories and photographs.
That gave us about an hour and 20 minutes to get stories read and pages completed. We'd lost almost two and a half hours of time.
And I had all the confidence in the world that Jim Winter, Brian Gray, Tere Dunlap and Jean Woodruff in the newsroom, and Jaimie Tran and Judy Crooks in the ad design department, could get it done.
And we did - about four minutes late, but certainly close enough.
Whew.
