Fire chiefs were planning emergency exercise when real emergency hit

Reaction to 911 outage here led out-of-state agencies to contact Minnehaha County for information

Minnehaha County fire chiefs happened to be meeting to plan an emergency exercise when they got the real deal.

That was the scenario last week when 911 emergency services went dark across the state. The Minnehaha County Fire Chiefs Association was meeting at the new Public Safety Campus when word filtered to the group that 911 was not working. The Public Safety Campus includes a state-of-the-art center for Metro Communications, which handles 911.

“We truly just ran down the hallway and started getting our arms around what was going on,” said Mike Gramlick, who is with Sioux Falls Fire Rescue and is acting director of Metro Communications. Gramlick gave a rundown of how events played out here during a debriefing with Minnehaha County commissioners this week.

While 911 was totally down, they learned that texting to 911 was still working, and they still had access to the seven-digit administration line. They sent an alert that appeared on cellphones notifying residents to use those two options if they had an emergency.

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