BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) - Office of Motor Vehicles locations across Louisiana were expected to reopen Friday, a day after being unable to process transactions because of a fire at the state police data center.
State police spokesman Maj. Doug Cain said the Thursday morning fire shut down all automated systems at the Department of Public Safety, which includes the motor vehicles offices.
“It appears to be some sort of short that took place because the electrical panel is burned up,” Cain said. “It’s a significant outage for the Department of Public Safety.”
Meghan Parrish, spokeswoman for the Division of Administration, described the fire’s cause as an electrical malfunction in a power supply.
The problem disrupted administrative processes and shut down department-wide email and Internet systems. That means the state police couldn’t process handgun permits and fingerprint background checks, and state troopers couldn’t access motor vehicles information at traffic stops, Cain said. Criminal databases also were down, he said.
The most obvious problem for the public was at OMV locations.
“Virtually every motor vehicles office in the state is unable to process transactions,” Cain said Thursday.
Parrish said the fire also disrupted state email and computer networks for other tenants at the public safety complex, including the corrections, revenue and insurance departments, along with the state health insurance office.
By Thursday afternoon, state email was back online and the damaged power supply was replaced. Parrish said the technicians’ work at the data center in Baton Rouge would continue through Thursday night, and all systems should be back online by Friday morning.
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