Case Studies
"Charlotte County Public Schools' WAN Bucks Hurricane Damage"
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Hurricane Charley's price tag is high: an estimated $7.4 billion in damage to Florida homes, businesses - school systems. In one of the hardest-hit areas though, technology is helping one school system bounce back fast. The area: Charlotte County, FL, where Category-4 Charley made landfall August 13th.. Thanks to Trillion, the Charlotte County Public Schools are surviving and getting back to its real challenge, education. Maintenance people, teachers, and technologists are working at breakneck speed to restore full school system operations by the scheduled re-opening date, August 30th.. The biggest challenge is restoring power county-wide. The Trillion high-speed WAN that CCPS installed in the spring of 2003, however, survived the hardest hitting hurricane in Florida in ten years.
Four days after the hurricane swept through, all sites served by CCPS's Lemon Bay facility were repaired and active. The system got power back to Murdock Center by 5:00PM on August 17th., and within 20 minutes of power being restored, all sites that had staff and power also have their WAN and internet access. The Trillion engineering team on-site were able to deliver access as soon as power was available. Members of Chris Bress's Learning Through Technology (LTT) group and Trillion continued the work in the following days, repairing the Kingsway Elementary School site, then moving on to Charlotte High School to make repairs there. One Trillion engineer is monitoring Charlotte High School, while others have moved on to Sallie Jones Elementary School, Charlotte Administration, and other CCPS subscriber sites. Due to hurricane damage, several CCPS sites will require heavy demolition and restructure, with at least two sites, Baker Pre-K and Punta Gorda Middle School are scheduled for complete demolition and rebuild. Getting CCPS back up and running technologically has been a major effort. It has gone much faster, though, thanks to the hardy Trillion infrastructure, the right-there Trillion technical support, and the hard work of CCPS technology groups. More news as it develops. |
