TUPPER LAKE — Unexplained, intermittent and brief power outages at the Tupper Lake Emergency Services building have caused headaches for the village police department as the outages wiped out much of what was stored on the department’s hard drives on Nov. 20.

TLPD Chief Eric Proulx briefed the village board on the situation at its Monday meeting, emphasizing that no data has been lost. That’s because the department simultaneously uploads its data — which includes various police arrest and incident reports, as well as body camera footage — to a secure online cloud to back up what it stores in its hard drives.

The issue, though, is that the online cloud stores the data in a different format than how it’s kept on the hard drives, and translating it back into a “workable format” for department business has proven to be a time-intensive endeavor.

“Fortunately, we have a virtual machine and upload all of our data to a cloud,” he said. “So the data was there. We haven’t lost any data. But, to get it back in a usable format has been quite an operation because it’s so much. We have so much video and our databases are large.”

Proulx described the outages as brief, only lasting a handful of seconds. He said it’s just enough time for the building’s backup generator to kick on before normal power resumes.

Proulx usually presents monthly TLPD statistics at the village board meetings, such as the number and nature of calls, but didn’t have those on Monday, as his department was still working on the format transfer for what was lost on the physical hard drives.

The longtime TLPD chief added that the village Municipal Electric Department performed tests on the powerlines leading to the emergency services building last week, and while there were brief outages within the building, the equipment had shown that the outside power supply had remained constant throughout.

“From the transformer to the building, there is nothing wrong with the village-supplied power,” Proulx said. “There’s no power loss. There are no issues whatsoever. So the power bumps, whatever they are, are something internal.”

Electric Superintendent Mike Dominie was not present at the village board meeting, as he was slated to work an overnight snow removal shift, assisting the village DPW crew. Village Trustee and Deputy Mayor Eric Shaheen questioned this, stating that if the emergency service building generators had turned on, there was presumably a dip in the power that was coming into the building.

Proulx deferred to Dominie on the test report’s specificities, and Shaheen — who owns and operates a general contracting company — said he would get in touch with Dominie to find out more. Shaheen added that it was imperative that the village find out what is causing these brief outages.

TLPD is able to keep track of when these outages occur because the WiFi system in the building’s Community Room will temporarily shut down, and self-report its outage time, serving as a proxy to gauge when the power was out, Proulx explained.

“There’s no rhyme or reason when it happens,” he said. “There’s no (specific) day in the week or time that it happens.”

As the village works to find the cause of the issue and address it, Proulx said he would tap into federal Drug Enforcement Agency grant funds to purchase a second, redundant server. He expected it to cost a few thousand dollars, but it was a prudent use of the grant.

“We’re going to buy another server identical to what we have as a redundant server,” he said. “It’ll keep mirroring itself and if this happens again, we’ll just change the IP address on the server and we’ll be down for maybe five minutes.”

Proulx explained that not every outage results in the hard drive losing data, it was just the specific timing and server interaction with that on Nov. 20 outage that cleared the hard drives. Having the redundant server mirroring the department’s current one should prevent that from happening again, he said.

“While it looked like it was working, it wasn’t,” he said. “So we had another power bump and the server was going through some kind of process — and it just destroyed the hard drives.”

TLPD’s newest body cameras are server-based, but the department had saved its older — but still functional — body cameras, and has been using those in the interim without issue, so there was no interruption to TLPD’s use of body cameras while officers are on duty.

Proulx added that he will be able to provide November’s monthly report along with this month’s at the January village board meeting.