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Sunnyside IT manager: fiber fire in Wapato caused four‑day outage; city to pursue backups
Summary
An April outage that cut city internet and email was traced to a fiber cut caused by a fire in Wapato. IT and city staff outlined steps to reduce future risk, including secondary internet service and cloud migration of email.
City IT and public‑works staff told the Sunnyside City Council that the city’s multi‑day internet and email outage was caused by a fiber cut tied to a fire in Wapato that disabled county‑provided circuits.
“There was a fire out in Wapato that cut a fiber that belongs to Yakima County,” said Japhet Silva, the city’s IT manager. He explained that the county’s line provides the city’s primary internet and that the outage prevented the city’s email server from sending and receiving mail while the county could not immediately repair the cable because of an ongoing investigation at the site.
IT staff described steps taken to restore critical functions during the outage, including deploying hotspots for some staff and ensuring police dispatch remained functional. Silva said the services returned once county crews were cleared to make repairs and the fiber was fixed.
To reduce future risk, staff recommended securing a secondary internet service provider and designing a failover architecture that keeps services running when a single circuit fails. Silva also recommended migrating the city’s email to a cloud provider to allow staff to access email from alternate connections; he noted that moving to cloud services could increase licensing costs and asked staff to identify budget offsets.
Councilors asked for options and costs; the IT manager said he has requested quotes and will return with recommendations. Several council members thanked IT staff for the response and for keeping essential public‑safety services operating during the outage.
