BELMONT COUNTY, Ohio – Belmont County residents have been left without an emergency alert system for nearly one week, leaving them possibly vulnerable in case of water advisories, threats, dangerous weather or disasters, but Belmont County 911 Director Brian Minder did not immediately inform the public about this outage.
Minder issued a press release late Wednesday afternoon, six days after the outage, stating that the CodeRed system was unavailable. You can read the full press release here.
Minder confirmed to River News on Wednesday morning that that the county’s CodeRED emergency notification system has been down since last Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025, due to an outage at OnSolve, which Minder said is the Florida-based company that provides the service. OnSolve appears to have an office in Alpharetta, Georgia, not Florida, per its website.
“They notified us that our system is down,” Minder said. “For whatever reason, I don’t have a reason of what’s down. I don’t know whether they got hacked. I don’t know whether they are just having issues with a server. I have no idea. They do not notify us of anything beyond that.”
Belmont County 911 Director Brian Minder
Although Minder initially said he did not know why CodeRed is not working after nearly a week, River News reached out to the OnSolve company via email on Wednesday and received an answer in just 47 minutes:
“We can confirm that OnSolve Code RED was the victim of a cybersecurity incident that was contained but damaged the OnSolve Code RED environment. We have decommissioned the OnSolve Code RED platform and we will expedite our plan to move all customers to our new Code RED by Crisis24 solution at no additional cost.”
Crisis 24 Communications for OnSolve/Code Red
Minder contacted River News by email Wednesday following our phone conversation and provided the same information from OnSolve.
He described CodeRED as “an emergency notification system, mass notification system, where we could notify multiple people at one time of events that may be affecting them,” including emergencies, community alerts, and weather notifications. However, Belmont County residents must opt-in to tell Belmont County 911 that they want to receive alerts…when the system is functioning.
Minder said he was not aware of any county-level situations since Thursday in which residents needed to be notified. When River News told Minder that the Belmont County Water & Sewer department had experienced notification failures per one of its staffers, he stated that his office had already informed all system users: “We notified the users of our system… everyone from 911 to the EMA to the water department to the sheriff’s office.” Belmont County Water & Sewer Director Kelly Porter denies that there were any water boil orders or alerts issued since last Thursday.
However, an official with the Belmont County Health Department told River News that Minder and Belmont County 911 did not notify their department of the CodeRed outage. That official emphasized that alerts such as water advisories are vital to public health since people could be unaware they are drinking unsafe water and could be sickened or even die, especially people such cancer patients who are immuo-compromised.
Minder emphasized that the county cannot fix the CodeRed outage problem:
“I have no control over anything that they do as far as fixing the issue. That’s all on them. Once the issue is fixed, they’ll notify us.”
Belmont County 911 Director Brian Minder
However, another county official told River News that they received communication from OnSolve that legacy CodeRed customers, like Belmont County, could have temporary access to an alternate platform, CodeRed by Crisis 24, which “remains operational as an emergency alerting solution” just by emailing the company.
Asked whether the outage poses a risk to residents, Minder said, “It’s a problem for everyone who uses the CodeRED system nationwide.” He added, “Their entire CodeRED system that they provide to anyone in the country that subscribes to it is down.”
Cascade County in Montana decided to terminate its contract with CodeRED this week after a system outage left the emergency alert platform offline and raised concerns about its security, reliability, and the lack of communication from its provider, OnSolve, according to KRTV. That county discovered the outage before a test of county systems. A Belmont County Water & Sewer Department worker said their office became aware of the CodeRed outage when customers called in with water concerns.
Minder said Belmont County has worked with the vendor for “at least 10 years or more.”
When asked how residents would be notified in an emergency, Minder said they could use FEMA’s IPAWS system for major disasters. “We can notify a local FEMA agency and have them put out an emergency message,” he said. But he added that IPAWS cannot be used for boil orders or water outages: “That is not a major disaster… it would have to fall within their parameters.”
When asked why local media were not notified of the outage, Minder responded, “We don’t notify anyone of anything being down except for the users of the system.” When questioned about notifying media in general, he said, “If there were something that the public needs to be notified of, we could alert the media… if there were something affecting the residents.”
River News was not notified of any issues with the CodeRed alert system or missed emergency alerts sent to residents sent since last Thursday until Minder issued a press release late Wednesday afternoon. We asked Minder on Wednesday morning to notify us of any issues the public needs to be aware of for their safety.
We reached out to inform Belmont County Commissioner Jerry Echemann about the matter, and at the time of publication late Wednesday afternoon, Echemann said Minder was preparing a press release about the issue which we did receive and published. In a later email, Echemann added that apparently Belmont County was attempting to take the “county list [of registered users’ numbers] and have these phone numbers transferred from OnSource to Crisis24.” Officials are determining if Belmont County CodeRed users need to register again for alerts. Echemann called the situation “fluid.”
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