Disaster and Emergency Procedures in Wyoming Prisons and Jails

Where is he. Is she safe. Why has nobody called. If you love someone inside a Wyoming prison or jail and a blizzard has buried the interstate, the wind has whipped the snow into a wall you cannot see through, and the temperature has fallen far below zero, those are the questions that take over. Wyoming is the least populated state in the country, a high, windswept land of plains and mountains, and its defining disaster is winter: the blizzard, the ground blizzard that turns a clear day to whiteout in minutes, and the killing cold that comes with relentless wind. Understanding how the system handles that is the key to understanding what happens to your person here.

This guide lays out what the Wyoming Department of Corrections does in an emergency, how county jails handle disasters, what the federal picture looks like, and exactly what you can do from the outside to find your person and stay in contact. It is written plainly, by someone who has been inside during a lockdown and has watched families go quiet with worry on the far end of a phone that would not ring. No false comfort. Just what is true and what to do.

A note on language

The Wyoming Department of Corrections uses the words inmate and offender in its records, and increasingly the phrase incarcerated individuals. I tend to say the person you love, because that is what they are, and because the people waiting on the outside matter just as much. I keep that in mind throughout.

Part 1: What the Wyoming DOC does during a disaster

The Wyoming Department of Corrections, WDOC, is headquartered in Cheyenne and is led by Director Daniel Shannon, a longtime corrections professional who has spent decades with the department, including as warden of the Wyoming Women's Center and as prison division administrator, before rising to director. He leads one of the smallest prison systems in the country: just five state facilities, plus a few contracted community corrections centers and statewide probation and parole supervision.

A small, spread-out system. Wyoming's prisons are few and far apart, scattered across a vast and lightly populated state. The Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins, off Interstate 80 in the south, is the maximum-security prison and the largest, and it holds the state's death row and execution chamber, though no one is currently under a death sentence in Wyoming. The Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington, in the southeast, serves as the main intake center for men. The Wyoming Women's Center in Lusk is the women's prison. The Wyoming Honor Farm in Riverton and the Wyoming Honor Conservation Camp in Newcastle round out the five, both lower-security facilities oriented toward work and rehabilitation. Because the system is so small, Wyoming has at times housed some of its prisoners out of state.

No public disaster plan, and that is standard. WDOC does not publish a detailed, facility-by-facility emergency plan for the public, and you should not read that silence as proof no plan exists. Corrections agencies treat detailed procedures as security-sensitive, because a published response is also a published vulnerability. The practical effect for you is that you cannot look up in advance exactly what would happen at your person's facility. You can know the general shape of the response, which is what this guide is for.

Shelter in place is the norm, and in Wyoming that means weathering the winter. Wyoming's prisons are built for this climate, with backup power and heat for when the grid fails. A blizzard is not met by moving people out; it is met by hunkering down inside a building made to hold its heat while the storm rages and the roads close. The realistic risks are loss of power and heat in extreme cold, and above all isolation: a facility cut off for a day or more when the interstate and the county roads are closed and no plow can keep ahead of the drifting snow. Evacuating a prison is a last resort everywhere, and in Wyoming the weather almost never calls for it. The danger is the cold and the cutoff, not the building.

Confirming custody and location. WDOC runs an online offender locator that shows a person's facility and identification number. In a blizzard or a major winter outage, that lookup and the facility's phone lines can be affected. Have the person's full legal name, date of birth, and WDOC number ready whenever you call or search. The state locator covers state prisoners only, not people in county jails, which are a separate system.

Communication during and after. When a winter storm knocks out power, the first thing to break is infrastructure. Phone systems and tablets go down with the grid, visiting is suspended, and there can be a stretch of silence that has nothing to do with your person's safety and everything to do with a downed line or a closed road. In Wyoming, the interstates themselves close routinely in winter, sometimes for a day or more, and a facility can be effectively sealed off by weather while everyone inside is warm and safe. Plan for a communication gap measured in hours, and during a major storm, potentially longer. The phones come back when the power and the roads do.

Commissary, property, and money. During an extended outage, commissary access can pause and resume when systems come back. Property generally stays put when people shelter in place. Account balances are tied to the WDOC number, so money you have sent stays attached to the person even if the system is briefly offline or they are moved.

Release dates and court dates. A disaster does not erase a release date, though a major storm can complicate the timing. Court dates are more likely to move: when a courthouse closes for weather, hearings are postponed and rescheduled, and Wyoming courts use video for some appearances. If your person has a hearing during a major storm, expect possible delay and confirm with the court or the attorney. And a winter release can itself be complicated by closed roads, so coordinate transportation with the weather in mind.

Climate vulnerability, plainly stated. Wyoming's leading hazard, by a wide margin, is winter weather: blizzards, ground blizzards, extreme cold, and the wind that makes both far worse. Wyoming is one of the windiest states in the country, and that wind turns ordinary snow into blinding, drifting whiteouts and drives wind chills to dangerous extremes. The state also faces wildfire in the warm months, especially in its forests and on the dry plains, along with flash flooding, drought, and the occasional tornado in the east. But it is the winter, and the wind, that define the danger here.

Part 2: County jails during disasters

Wyoming's twenty-three counties each run their own jail through the county sheriff, separate from the state prison system. In a state this rural, that means most jails are small, and preparedness varies between the larger detention centers in the bigger towns and the small jails in remote counties. The Laramie County Detention Center in Cheyenne and the Natrona County Detention Center in Casper, in the state's two largest population centers, are among the bigger county facilities.

A larger county jail will have backup power and a continuity plan; a small rural jail may depend heavily on the county emergency management office and on arrangements with neighboring counties or the state. Because Wyoming has no federal prison, the county jails also hold people for federal authorities, so a person in federal custody in Wyoming is very likely sitting in a county jail. In a blizzard, the concern at any of them is the same as at the prisons: heat, power, and the roads.

How to find someone moved from a county jail during an emergency. If a jail relocates people, they usually go to another county jail or a state facility under a mutual-aid agreement. Start with the sheriff's office for the county where your person was booked, not 911. The jail roster, where one is posted online, is the fastest first check, and the county's non-emergency line is the right number. During a major winter storm, expect those lines to be busy or briefly down, and rely on official county channels for confirmation.

Part 3: Federal prisons in Wyoming

Here is a fact that surprises many families and makes Wyoming unique: there is no federal Bureau of Prisons prison anywhere in Wyoming. It is the only state without one. The historic territorial prison in Laramie, which was federal long ago, is now a museum.

For families, the practical points are these. People facing federal charges in Wyoming are typically held in a county jail under a federal contract while their cases proceed, so you would use that county jail's contacts and the federal court system, not the state locator. And once someone is sentenced to federal prison, they are sent to a Bureau of Prisons facility in another state, tracked through the BOP's national inmate locator. That out-of-state placement is its own hardship for visiting and contact, entirely separate from any disaster. The upside, if there is one, is that a federal sentence served elsewhere may take your person out of Wyoming's hardest winters, even as it adds distance; and a federal detainee waiting in a Wyoming county jail faces the same local winter as everyone else, so the same preparation applies.

Part 4: What families should do

This is the part to save. When a winter storm warning goes up, the wind starts to howl, or the forecast turns bitterly cold, the difference between panic and a plan is mostly preparation. Here is the sequence.

Before anything happens. Write down your person's full legal name, date of birth, and WDOC number or county booking number, and keep it somewhere you can grab fast. Know exactly which facility holds them and which system runs it, state or county, because that tells you which locator and which contacts to use. Keep your own contact information current with the facility so any notification reaches you. Bookmark the WDOC offender locator and save the relevant county's non-emergency number. If victim or family notification is available through Wyoming's service, registering ahead can give you an automated alert if your person's status or location changes. And make your own winter plan, because in a Wyoming storm you may be snowed in or stranded yourself, and you cannot help your person if you are not safe.

During and immediately after. Try normal channels first, a call or a message. If those fail, do not call the facility switchboard over and over; during a regional storm those lines are easily overwhelmed or down, and you only add to the jam. Go to the WDOC website and its social media for official updates, and watch local news, the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, and the state road-conditions service for the broader picture. Do not drive toward a facility through a blizzard or a closed road. Wyoming's winter highways are genuinely deadly, ground blizzards cause whiteouts and pileups, drivers get stranded and die of exposure, and the interstate closures exist precisely to keep you off the road. You will not be allowed in anyway.

Short-term aftermath. Once you reach your person or get official confirmation, verify three things: that they are physically all right, that the facility has heat and power back or a working backup, and the state of their property and account. After a winter storm, ask specifically about heat and whether the facility lost power or was cut off by road closures. Write down what you are told and who told you, including the date and time. Then settle in for a return to normal as the roads reopen and the region digs out.

Longer term. If your person went without adequate heat, water, food, or medical care during an extended outage or storm, that is worth a written complaint to WDOC, or to the county if they are in a county jail. Document what you can. In a small system, an individual account carries weight, and your record of what happened becomes part of how the facility is held to account.

Part 5: Historical context, what has actually happened

Wyoming's disaster history is, more than almost anywhere, a history of winter, of storms so severe they became legends.

The Blizzard of 1949. The benchmark Wyoming disaster is the Blizzard of 1949, remembered across the high plains as the Storm of the Century. Beginning in early January, it buried southeast Wyoming and the surrounding region under snow whipped by winds gusting past sixty miles an hour, with temperatures plunging far below zero. Roads and railroads were impassable within hours, towns were isolated, trains full of passengers sat stranded, and the storms and bitter cold kept coming for two more months. The federal government launched a massive relief effort, airdropping hay to cattle and sending the military to reach snowbound ranches. A dozen people died in Wyoming, and tens of thousands of cattle were lost. The Blizzard of 1949 is the storm against which Wyomingites still measure every winter.

The cold and the wind. Wyoming's winters set records that have stood for nearly a century. In 1933, an Arctic outbreak nicknamed the Siberian Express drove the temperature in Yellowstone to sixty-six below zero, a mark that still stands. Severe winter storms and high-wind events strike the state nearly every year, and they are among the deadliest weather Wyoming faces, precisely because the wind turns snow into a blinding, drifting hazard and cold into something that can kill in minutes of exposure. This is the disaster Wyoming families should plan around above all others, because some version of it comes every single winter. The reassurance is that these facilities are built for exactly this, with backup heat and power and staff who plan for the cold every year, so the worry is a long outage during a dangerous cold snap, not the building failing your person in the storm.

Fire, water, and a rare tornado. Wyoming's warm months bring their own hazards. The state averages hundreds of wildfires a year, and its deadliest natural disaster was actually a fire, the Blackwater Fire of 1937 near Cody, which killed fifteen firefighters. Flash flooding strikes occasionally, including a deadly 1985 flood in Cheyenne. And in 1987, a rare and violent tornado tore through the high country of the Teton wilderness near Yellowstone, one of the highest-elevation strong tornadoes ever recorded. But these are the exceptions. Winter is the rule.

The pattern for families. Wyoming's message is as old as the territory: the winter here is severe, the wind makes it worse, and the danger to your person is the cold, the loss of heat and power, and the isolation of roads no one can keep open in a blizzard, not the building giving way. The prisons and jails are built for this climate and stocked to ride it out, and the silence you experience during a storm is almost always closed roads and downed lines, not your person being in danger.

The Bottom Line

Wyoming is the least populated state, a high and windswept land whose defining disaster is the winter, the blizzards and ground blizzards and killing cold that the Storm of the Century in 1949 burned into the state's memory and that some milder version visits every year. For a prison or jail built for this climate, the threat is rarely the building; it is the loss of heat and power and the isolation of roads closed by snow and wind. For you, the practical meaning is this: know which facility holds your person and which system runs it, remember that a person in federal custody here is almost certainly in a county jail because Wyoming has no federal prison, keep your contact information current, and prepare above all for the winter and the wind. Use the offender locator and official channels instead of an overwhelmed switchboard, and never drive into a Wyoming blizzard to reach a facility. And when the silence comes, hold steady, because here it is almost always the storm blowing through and the roads still closed, not your person being in harm's way.

The connection comes back. It just takes longer than any of us would want.