DETROIT – City Public Works Department yard on Russell on the east side and a facility near the incinerator at Interstate 96 and the Davison Freeway.
While technically-challenged in many ways, the city uses a computerized system to dispense gasoline to vehicles such as fire trucks and trash trucks. On Monday, the computer system was down and city vehicles could not get gas. Local 4 has learned several Detroit police cars in the southwest district ran out of gas.
Detroit CFO Gary Brown says it was not the city's fault.
"It was planned maintenance on the City-County building to turn off the electricity over the weekend to do some maintenance, and so our computer department switched all of our computer lines out to a secondary site so that we could do maintenance here at the City-County building," said Brown.
The City-County building is managed by Wayne County contractor Hines. The maintenance on the electrical equipment went smoothly over the weekend. However, the city's computer did not like the powering back up process. The coolers for the main servers did not go back on and a balky router prevented email from working for about a day and 1/2.
On Tuesday, the city had to have employees stand by the gas pumps to manually reset them, allowing for gasoline to flow.
As of Wednesday evening, the city was able to get its computer systems back up and running. Local 4 saw police cars and all other city vehicles getting gassed up without difficulty.