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Volume 56, No. 5
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CHESTERLAND NEWS Wednesday, July 31, 2024
Your Community Newspaper Since 1967
Fairmount Preps for 48 Years of Art By Allison Wilson editor@karlovecmedia.com
As July draws to a close, artists from across Northeast Ohio are working hard to put the finishing touches on pieces to submit to an exhibition now nearly 50 years running. “The Fairmount Art Exhibition — we are in our 48th year and it’s a wonderful community arts exhibition that brings together artists from various disciplines, both people who are professional practicing artists, as well as people who maybe create art at their home, maybe they haven’t shown as much and yet, they’re still creating amazing works of art,” Fairmount Center for the Arts Executive Director Elizabeth Bolander said. The exhibition, running Aug. 6-23, places Fairmount in a different light, Bolander added. “We turn all of our dance studios that for 11 months of the year are filled with kids and adults doing
dance and theater and music activities, and we turn them into this beautiful gallery space,” she said. Around 140 art pieces were accepted last year out of around 400 submissions, Bolander said. Submissions for the exhibition this year are being accepted July 27 and July 29, and are being juried on July 30. “A juried show means that people bring their artworks in and then they go through this process where, for us, we have three jurors and they change every single year, who those people are,” she explained. “They meet and they look at every single artwork and decide whether it has the sort of artistic merit, or certain criteria that they’re looking for to be of a certain caliber to be included in the show.” While the jurors vary each year, they will generally look at a piece’s technical merit — the emotions or reactions it may promote — as well See Art • Page 3
SUBMITTED
Best of Show 2023 Artist Joe Stavec and board member and sponsor Lorraine Szabo in front of his winning work, “Anticipation of a Moment.”
County Quick to Solve CrowdStrike IT Failure Pushes for Class Action Suit to Recover Tax Dollars By Amy Patterson amy@karlovecmedia.com An international internet outage took out computers all over the world last week, causing delays and shutdowns across the airline industry, hospitals and crucial 9-1-1 phone systems. The outage, caused by a faulty update pushed by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, also hit Geauga County. The county first became aware of the issue shortly after midnight July 19, Geauga County Auditor Chuck Walder told Geauga County Commissioners at their July 23 meeting. “The early warning here in the county was, within approximately an hour or so, the sheriff detected two of his servers having communication issues,” he said.
Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand lost 9-1-1 service and any other server-based operations, said Walder, who also heads the county IT department under the Automatic Data Processing board. Hildenbrand made the issue known immediately to Chief Deputy Administrator Frank Antenucci. “Actually, he sent a cruiser, I think, to Frank's house,” Walder said. County IT staff immediately tried to access their servers remotely, but realized that was not going to solve the problem, he said. As news reports poured in, it became clear the problem was global and the solution would not be an easy one. The fix required direct access to each computer and could not be managed remotely, Walder said. All IT staff were summoned
to begin to work on the issue and the county’s servers were up and running by around 6 a.m., although individual workstations took a little longer. “Workstations, which we have 1,200 of, had to be gone to station-by-station and the same process had been gone through,” he said. “Virtually, we had every student, we had everybody who had two good hands and could type, basically, going in and doing this (fix).” Walder said staff prioritized safety forces and triaged repairs through the rest of the day. “The triage plan that we have in place worked like clockwork,” he said. “That's the good news. The bad news is we had to use our triage plan.” Walder said while he had read estimates the outage affected about 8.5 million users worldwide — and Geauga County is a “small piece of
the pie” in terms of those numbers — he and county Prosecutor Jim Flaiz are planning to ask Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost about the possibility of joining a class action suit against CrowdStrike to recover the cost of downtime caused by the incident, as well as the labor costs involved in the fix. “It cost us roughly $340,000 for that upset,” he said. “That does not include labor. That is just what our budget burned in that window of time that we were unproductive.” Walder said he believes that amount — when combined with the cost of repairs required in all 88 county governments and other entities that use CrowdStrike across Ohio — will cause Yost to take notice and hopefully take action. He also gave the county credit for moving multiple servers into the See CrowdStrike • Page 7
INSIDE Obituaries page 2
Town Crier page 4
Classifieds page 8
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