Pat Kobbe, Emergency Services Director, Will Be Missed

On March 26th, emergency services personnel paid their final respects to Pat Kobbe. The Sheridan and Grant City Fire Departments along with the Worth County Ambulance participated, blocking off Route 46 as she was buried at the Grant City Cemetery. She was instrumental in helping the county recover after the Ice Storm as well as the Grant City Square Fire. She obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars for the county after numerous storms that washed away our roads and forced county crews to do days and weeks of extra work keeping them up.

The Ice Storm of 2007 shut down the entire area and knocked out the entire area from Iowa to Oklahoma. In this area, nearly all the radio stations were knocked off the air because the power was out; the Sheridan Express didn’t print because the electricity was out at the printer’s. Trees were snapped off like sticks and the power was not restored to the area for three days. Kobbe was instrumental in making sure there were generators so that people could stay at Orilla’s Way or the WCCC (Now the Worth County Care & Rehab Center). She helped secure generators for the county so that if a catastrophe like this happened again, people would have places to stay.

Despite battling illness, she never let it stop her from doing whatever it took to help the county prepare for disasters and avoid the worst effects. We learned a lot from the two tornado awareness programs she helped organize for the area. She helped get sirens for every community in the county so that there would be a warning in the event a tornado did strike the area. A few years ago, the sirens were activated for real as a twister near Parnell was headed directly for Grant City. Luckily, it fizzled out; however, people were prepared in case of the worst.