Pennington County emergency officials press Black Hills Energy for local detail as utility plans preemptive power shutoffs

Pennington County emergency management officials told the Board of Commissioners on June 17 that Black Hills Energy’s plan to use preemptive, weather‑driven public safety power shutoffs could cause serious local consequences if outages last beyond a day.

Dustin Willett, the county’s director of emergency management, said the county has not yet received enough detail from the utility to map likely impacts and prepare response and support operations. "Long‑duration power loss is over 24 hours," Willett said, stressing that outages of that length raise acute concerns about people who rely on electrically powered medical devices, refrigerated medicine and food, electric well pumps, and telecommunication reliability.

The discussion followed a detailed briefing from Willett and a presentation by Black Hills Energy Vice President Steven Dunn. Dunn told commissioners the company considers public safety power shutoffs a last‑resort tool and has been developing localized criteria that combine weather station data, fuel‑load modeling and other risk metrics. "A public safety power shutoff is not like the first lever that we look to pull," Dunn said, and he described company efforts to refine notifications and to limit the customer count and duration of any shutdowns.

Willett and county officials urged more two‑way collaboration. Willett said emergency staff are working to map medically fragile residents and critical infrastructure so the county can estimate the "course of harm" and determine the scale of logistics — bottled water, reception centers, sheltering and communications — that a long outage might require. He noted the county’s planning assumption from past disasters that roughly 8% of an affected population will need direct assistance during a major event.

Dunn said Black Hills Energy is expanding its weather‑monitoring network and working with meteorologists to refine decisions and give customers as much advance notice as possible — he said the company aims for a 72‑hour forecast window where feasible and will issue multiple notifications as conditions develop. He also described technical options the utility is pursuing to limit customer impacts, such as sectionalizing lines and targeting smaller areas rather than broad geographic zones.

County officials pressed for specifics they said are necessary for local planning: which circuits or neighborhoods would be candidates for de‑energizing based on specific weather station triggers, how many customers might be affected in those zones, which water systems and wastewater lift stations lack backup power, and how telecommunication and cellular services would hold up during outages. Dunn said Black Hills Energy has shared data in meetings and on a limited basis, and that the company is building an external web portal and outage‑mapping tools customers can use to assess risk for individual service points.

Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Mark Hughes and county 911 Deputy Director Stephanie Olson said advance coordination is essential. Olson described the county’s plan to route non‑emergency public information calls to 2‑1‑1 during the holiday and to use call‑handling tools and live links to push maps and preparedness guidance. Hughes said the Sheriff’s Office has historically focused enforcement and outreach in border areas where municipal fireworks and county allowances differ; he urged more consistent public messaging from all partners.

Willett said some open questions are legal and financial: who pays for large logistical efforts if long outages trigger distributions, sheltering or medical evacuations, and what liability exposures arise when utilities de‑energize lines as wildfire mitigation. Dunn said insurers and the electric industry have raised similar issues nationwide and that cost tradeoffs are part of the broader policy conversation.

The commissioners did not take formal votes on the utility’s plan. Several commissioners praised the utility’s engagement but echoed Willett’s call for more granular, shared data so county departments can prepare targeted mitigation and response actions. Willett said the county will continue to press for datasets linking medically dependent residents, critical water and lift stations, and telecommunications nodes to Black Hills Energy’s proposed shutoff zones so planners can finalize logistics, communications and funding contingencies.