Vanessa Dietz/Daily Mining Gazette Ontonagon County Sheriff Dale Rantala and other county staff convinced the county board to address some safety issues at the county courthouse.

ONTONAGON — A recent live shooter training at the Ontonagon County Courthouse revealed some vulnerabilities the Ontonagon County Board of Commissioners began to address at its monthly meeting.

“The courthouse currently has no system for communicating from office to office, or floor to floor, except for calling individual offices or walking to them,” Ontonagon County Sheriff Dale Rantala wrote to the council in a Feb. 17 letter to the board and spoke to the commissioners about Tuesday. “I would like to have a system programmed that would facilitate communication.”

Rantala recommended a program available locally, which the board approved.

“Craig Immonen, Ontonagon County Telephone Co., informed me that we could program a system called Firebar Operation,” Rantala wrote, telling the board the system would involve the main lines to the 10 offices in the courthouse having a special ring tone to denote someone inside is calling to alert everyone to an emergency situation. “The Ontonagon Village Fire Department used this system for many years.”

At a price of $24 per month, the board unanimously approved putting the program in place immediately.

Rantala was one of several law enforcement officers who conducted a live shooter training at the courthouse on Jan. 23.

Deputy County Clerk Janice Erickson spoke on behalf of fellow courthouse staff, encouraging the board to attend to problems identified in the training that would keep them and the public safe in the building.

The board also gave the go-ahead to purchase 26 fire extinguishers at $15 each from True Value Hardware in Ontonagon. Employees learned the emergency devices can do double duty, by putting out fires – or hampering the efforts of someone threatening to do harm.

“It can be weaponized,” Commissioner Gray Webber noted of the metal canisters that spray a lot of fire retardant material fast.

The board also agreed to put another safety measure in place: this one to monitor the boiler. The county will purchase the Sensaphone 0400 for $375, for which a phone jack will need to be installed. The device measures temperature, sound and power and when it detects a problem, it automatically dials up to four phone numbers, until someone acknowledges the warning.

In addition, Rantala asked for funds to provide comprehensive CPR training to courthouse employees, which the board agreed to cover, unless a grant can be found for the $575 necessary to train 24 employees.