Former and current Southwestern College Institutional Technology employees said IT managers were entirely responsible for a catastrophic 2015 server meltdown and that embarrassed administrators fraudulently sued a construction company in an attempt to shift the blame.
Former SWC IT manager Paul Norris said negligence by IT staff allowed a chain of events culminating in the July 14, 2015 overheating of the college’s most essential computer and telephone servers.
Norris and two SWC IT professionals who asked that their names not be used for fear of retribution came forward to describe how the event unfolded and its aftermath. They had documents and photos, as well as emails between former IT Director Dan Borges and IT staff. They said the college lost years of fiscal data in the meltdown, as well as undetermined student data. Fiscal services staff spent nearly a year re-inputting data from paper records pulled from storage.
Borges falsely blamed the episode on Paradigm Mechanical Corporation (PMC), a contractor that had installed a temporary air conditioning system in a remodeled building that housed the college’s computer servers, according to Norris. Borges knew that college IT staff was at fault for the failure, Norris said. Two other IT employees corroborated Norris’ version of events.
SWC’s insurance provider, Federal Insurance Company, filed a lawsuit against PMC on March 2, 2018, blaming the air conditioning system it installed in July 2015 for what Borges described as “a severe technological disaster.” Borges said at the time the meltdown was the worst he had seen in his 30 years of IT experience.
During the evening of July 14 a temporary AC unit shutdown. College servers superheated to temperatures in excess of 130 degrees, causing essential parts of the sensitive equipment to physically melt. Years of financial records were lost, as were an undetermined amount of student records. Fiscal services clerical staff spent more than a year working evenings, weekends and holidays re-entering invoices, bills and accounts payable information from boxes of originals pulled from storage. SWC’s counseling department also lost files described by staff as scheduling annotations, possibly others.
Borges blamed Paradigm Mechanical for the meltdown and data loss. The college filed a suit seeking $137,440 for breach of contract and negligence. At least three college employees came forward to assert that the meltdown was the fault of SWC IT staff, not Paradigm Mechanical.
Internal IT reports stated that Borges was repeatedly reminded of the importance of the AC system.
“The need to support power and cooling was emphasized on numerous occasions during the course of regular meetings held between SWC personnel and the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) contractor,” the report said.
Norris said the AC unit cooling the building with the servers failed due to a loss of the chilled water essential to the cooling process.
“The temporary cooling unit was relying on the chilled water from the central plant,” he said. “The central plant shutdown, as it normally did, at about midnight. So there was no more cold water coming to that air conditioning unit to create the cold air to circulate throughout the room. Had someone thought ‘Oh, you gotta make sure the chiller’s on for tonight’ the meltdown wouldn’t have occurred.”
SWC staff also forgot to reconnect a critical temperature monitor designed to warn senior IT staff of high temperatures in the server room. The device includes a communication device with a thermometer that plugs into the server controlling the college telephone system. If temperatures exceed safe limits, the device automatically dials the cellular phones of staff to alert them. Borges ordered, supervised and approved the work done on the server room cabling system.
“We had a system,” Norris said. “There was some work done in the computer room, and inadvertently the people who were working in there, IT people, didn’t plug it back in.”
Norris provided The Sun with a July 10, 2015 email Borges sent to the entire department as corroboration. It touted the successful reorganization of the fiber optic cables that carry data across the college network and included before-and-after photos of the reorganized cable network.
Norris noticed in Borges’ before-and-after photos that the temperature-monitoring device was not reconnected. It did not appear at all in the after photo.
Borges, in an interview with The Sun shortly after the meltdown, blamed the college for the data loss because it had failed to listen to his advice and had “outdated equipment for so long.”
“In the report IT took responsibility, it’s true we needed resources,” Borges said. “The risks were known. The district accepted those risks.”
Norris and two other IT professionals with access to the information said Borges ordered an IT employee to destroy at least three months of emails on the college server that were potential evidence in the lawsuit. Journalists from The Sun met with Norris and the two professionals, who asked that their names not be used for fear of retribution by college administrators.
In response to the college’s suit, PMC filed a 19-part defense alleging that SWC filed its lawsuit in bad faith and had neglected to mitigate damages. PMC and FIC entered into mediation in June 2019 and reached a settlement the following month. Both parties moved to settle the suit with prejudice. A Superior Court judge dismissed the case on Sept. 31 of last year.
College president Dr. Kindred Murillo said she did not know the details of the case because it was handled by the college’s risk management company, Keenan & Associates. Borges did not respond to requests for comment.
