Atchison County to switch to Everbridge alert system July 1, 2026

Atchison County residents will need to enroll in Everbridge if they want to keep receiving county alerts after Aug. 1, when Crisis24 CodeRED is set to be discontinued. The county says both systems will run during a transition beginning July 1, giving households time to move over before CodeRED shuts down. Everbridge alerts can be delivered by phone call, text message, email and mobile app notification.

The practical stakes are high because the alert system is one of the county’s main ways to push urgent public-safety messages faster than a website post or social media update. The county has said that people who do not sign up for Everbridge will no longer receive county notifications after Aug. 1, a gap that could matter during hazardous weather, road problems or other fast-moving emergencies.

The change comes after a turbulent year for the county’s notification network. On Nov. 19, 2025, the sheriff’s office said CodeRED was offline because of a cybersecurity incident that damaged the platform, forcing the county to rely on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Integrated Public Alert & Warning System for emergency, life-safety notifications only. By Dec. 10, 2025, the county said access to the new CodeRED by Crisis24 platform had been restored, but the most recent available backup was still from March 31, 2025, and contact information from CodeRED user accounts had been compromised and appeared to have been published online.

The sheriff’s office also said automated weather alerts were still not available on Dec. 10, 2025, though they were expected to return soon. That history explains why county officials are treating the Everbridge rollout as more than a routine software change. For Atchison County, the switch is part of making sure emergency warnings keep moving even when one system fails.

County officials have also pointed to the rest of the warning network. Atchison County’s outdoor warning siren system includes 15 strategically placed sirens, but the sheriff’s office says those sirens are only one part of a larger strategy. The county’s communications center dispatches for the police department, sheriff, fire, EMS, all rural fire departments and emergency management, with 10 full-time dispatchers and one supervisor, and two to three dispatchers on duty per shift.

In a county with 16,348 people in the 2020 Census and an estimated population of 16,172 on July 1, 2025, the alert system covers a small but spread-out service area. The county’s move to Everbridge now stands as a test of communication continuity, with the July 1 overlap and Aug. 1 cutoff marking the key dates that determine who stays covered.