Sheridan County emergency manager describes multi‑county outage, alert failures and localized equipment damage

Jesse, Sheridan County emergency management, told commissioners the county responded to a widespread multi‑county power outage that caused multiple small fires from power surges and required coordination with hospitals, the VA and local emergency responders. Volunteer fire departments extinguished the fires, Jesse said, and no active fires remained by the time of the meeting.

Jesse described a failure in the emergency alert chain: the county’s alert vendor sends messages to FEMA, which forwards validated alerts to carriers for distribution; FEMA and the vendor were stopping pushes after one hour, yet some residents continued to receive alerts. Jesse said he spent several hours contacting FEMA, the carrier providers and the alert software vendor over the weekend and obtained an engineers’ email address to pursue a fix. "I will continue to work on this as diligently as I can to hopefully address the problem," Jesse said.

Facilities staff reported generator issues at county buildings: most backup generators engaged, but one justice office’s transfer‑switch electronics failed and had to be switched to manual, and some radio equipment showed potential damage. Preliminary damage estimates were said to be below $5,000 for items staff expected to process through insurance or maintenance pathways; departments were asked to report damage to IT or maintenance so county staff can evaluate claims.

County leaders said they will continue after‑action reporting and investigations to identify improvements to alerting, coordination and infrastructure resilience.

Provenance: Emergency management report and Q&A began at SEG 160 and continued through follow‑up facility and insurance details at SEG 331.