Oak Ridge City Council voted unanimously to retroactively approve an emergency contract with File Savers Data Recovery (Corvallis, Montana) for $100,150 to recover police video data after a major data-access incident.

City staff described a loss of access to approximately 60 terabytes of police video. The city worked with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI to attempt recovery and ultimately contracted an outside specialist, which staff said recovered the data. The files are being returned to city custody as recovery completes.

Miss Pestman (city staff) said the recovered footage related to many cases, including more than 2,000 matters that were still active. “When you take the money and divide it by a thousand cases, it comes out, like, $50 per case,” a council member observed; staff said the recovery cost was modest compared with the potential legal and investigative consequences of permanently lost evidence.

Council voted 6-0 to approve the emergency contract retroactively.