TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — By Wednesday afternoon, there was little on Monroe Street to suggest what happened there one day earlier.
The pavement was patched.
Traffic was moving.
Power was back.
But walk inside the Leon County Courthouse, and the recovery looked different.
Criminal courtroom doors remained locked Wednesday as most criminal proceedings across Florida’s 2nd Judicial Circuit stayed suspended following Tuesday morning’s underground electrical fire and explosion.
The blast damaged county communications infrastructure, disrupting phone and computer systems used by the courts and other government agencies.
For Tallahassee criminal defense attorney Aaron Wayt, that meant something unusual.
No court.
An empty courtroom means something
Wayt has practiced criminal defense in Tallahassee since 2010.
Unlike attorneys in some other areas of law, Wayt said criminal defense lawyers can find themselves inside a courtroom virtually every day.
A typical criminal docket, he said, can involve more than 100 people and 10 to 20 defense attorneys.
Those attorneys may be setting cases for trial, entering pleas or scheduling the next step in a prosecution.
Tuesday and Wednesday, much of that stopped.
“At the beginning when the explosion happened, it took out the ability for the courts to communicate with the criminal defense lawyers, with the criminal bar,” Wayt said. “And so it was tough knowing whether or not we would have court yesterday or today.”
Eventually, attorneys learned those proceedings would not happen.
But Wayt said not every canceled hearing carries the same consequences.
A routine case-management hearing can simply be rescheduled for another day.
A trial is different.
“If your case was a trial, if you were supposed to have a trial yesterday or today, sure, that throws a large wrench into that trial,” Wayt said. “Those jurors who were supposed to be there, and so all of that is out of everyone in the court’s control.”
Then there are the people waiting outside the courtroom.
Wayt said people represented by attorneys generally have someone who can help them determine when their case has been rescheduled.
Someone representing themselves may not.
“Sometimes it’s just much tougher for the people with less means than those who are able to afford an attorney,” Wayt said.
And for someone already behind bars, Wayt said a delay can carry another consequence.
“The people that are most affected by this are the ones in jail, are the ones who don’t have an attorney,” Wayt said. “The ones who are sitting in jail may be waiting for their hearing yesterday to get a bond and that hearing didn’t happen.”
The disruption spreads
The courthouse wasn’t the only place affected.
Leon County officials said the explosion damaged county infrastructure, disrupting phone and computer service.
Text-to-911 went offline.
Some county phone lines experienced problems.
Libraries remained open but lost internet and phone service.
At the Leon County Detention Facility, the Sheriff’s Office temporarily suspended in-person visitation after losing access to a county system.
Video visitation remained available.
Shonda Knight, a spokesperson for the Leon County Sheriff’s Office, said the agency was notified shortly after the downtown incident and soon learned some of its systems had been affected.
“We did have some phone lines down, but it’s not a system we use for urgent contact,” Knight said. “So there may have been some inconvenience for some individuals who wanted to speak to personnel here in the office.”
By Wednesday afternoon, Knight said in-person visitation had resumed and the Sheriff’s Office was back to normal.
Getting there required agencies across Tallahassee to respond to something Knight said she had never encountered before.
“We’ve certainly had hurricanes come through the area where all of the local first responder agencies have to really work together very closely to communicate, to get information out and to solve issues,” Knight said. “But we’ve not seen one where there’s been an underground issue that caused this sort of disruption.”
Knight said the number of systems affected made restoring service a priority.
“Because of all the systems that was impacted by that explosion on yesterday, it was the top priority and it was all hands on deck,” Knight said.
How does one hole cause so many problems?
That leaves another question.
How can damage beneath one section of one downtown street disrupt services in so many different places?
FOX49 asked Scott Smith of Tallahassee-based Network Technology Solutions to help explain.
Smith works with computer networks and said several of his own clients were among those who lost service following Tuesday’s incident.
At first, he feared the disruption could last considerably longer.
“The first reports we got, we thought we might be down a week or more,” Smith said.
That did not happen.
Smith said the affected clients he works with regained service and power much faster than initially expected.
But Smith said different organizations and connections can sometimes depend on infrastructure that travels through the same physical area.
That means damage in the right place can spread far beyond the point where it occurs.
“It could be just a perfect storm where it affected multiple locations because they’re traversing the same path to get back either to a central location or to some other breaking point,” Smith said.
There are ways to prepare for a failure.
Smith said organizations can use multiple internet providers and separate paths for their connections. Other options, including satellite service, can provide another way online if physical connections are damaged.
But even a well-designed system cannot anticipate everything.
“It is possible to even happen in a well-designed network,” Smith said. “There’s a lot of things that you can’t predict.”
The exact circumstances surrounding Leon County’s network disruption remain under investigation.
The street is fixed. The questions aren’t.
For Wayt, the last two days have demonstrated how much a modern courthouse depends on technology most people walking through its doors never see.
He remembers a time when courts were far less dependent on electronic systems.
Now, losing them can stop proceedings.
“That was the scary thing yesterday, to know that something could happen that would just halt all criminal court,” Wayt said.
It is not the first recent disruption Wayt has seen.
He pointed to a separate clerk system outage several months ago as another example of how dependent courts have become on technology.
“What happens in a case where that technology is targeted or unfortunately an accident happens and we aren’t able to hold criminal court?” Wayt said. “People in jail, people are waiting to get back to their lives, people are finishing their sentences and wanting to return to their lives.”
“When we’re so reliant on tech and that tech is interrupted,” he added, “it puts a big wrench in things.”
Officials have not yet said when normal criminal court proceedings will fully resume.