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Lightning strike disables Pratt County dispatch systems; county orders emergency replacements
Summary
A lightning strike knocked out Pratt County’s CAD, voice recorder and parts of its radio system, forcing dispatchers to use paper logs for hours. County staff ordered equipment and will seek insurance reimbursement while 911 funds cover immediate costs.
Nate, a county technology/communications staffer, told the Pratt County Commission that lightning struck a communications tower over the weekend and knocked out the county’s computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and voice recording systems, and degraded portions of the radio network. “Lightning struck the tower. It went down and scribe up a lot of stuff throughout the PD … the CAD system … that system’s still down,” Nate said.
Nate said dispatchers reverted to pen-and-paper incident logging while staff replaced critical switches and ordered replacement hardware. The county used the health department facility as a temporary dispatch site; an MOU with Barton County allowed remote checks of license-plate and warrants information to support operations. “Thankfully, we have the system down there in the health department, so that's where dispatch is currently running as a backup,” Nate said.
The outage affected 911 mapping, voice recordings and parts of the radio system used by the sheriff’s office; some 800‑megahertz equipment was down while 400‑megahertz radios continued to work. Commissioners and staff discussed insurance coverage and immediate funding. County staff said 911 funds have been used to order replacement equipment so emergency services are not delayed, and the county will pursue reimbursement from insurance. “911 is gonna cover all this because we went ahead and started ordering stuff because it needs to be ordered,” Nate said.
Commissioners praised dispatchers for maintaining operations during the outage and discussed long-term backups, including placing an updated laptop and redundant network access at a tornado‑resistant location. Board members directed staff to coordinate with insurance and partner counties and to return with a plan for a more robust backup to reduce the risk of similar outages in future emergencies.
The next procedural step: staff will continue equipment replacement and bring a backup/contingency plan for dispatch resilience back to the commission for review.
