Governor Tim Walz was joined by local, county, and state leaders in Bemidji on Tuesday, June 24, where he surveyed and received an update on damages from the storm that hit Beltrami County on Saturday, June 21, and resulted in a state of emergency being declared. Gov. Walz described the storm as “unprecedented” when speaking to press, but also stated without the efforts of local and county leadership, things could have been much worse.

RELATED STORIES: Beltrami County declares State of Emergency after powerful storms damage area

“We would have had significant injuries and deaths potentially, in here, except for the leadership that’s here, except for the preparation that goes into it and the work that’s done to protect citizens,” said Governor Walz. “So, I for one am incredibly grateful. You can see the massive amount of work. It’s incredibly impressive in 48 hours how much they’ve done.”

Gov. Walz also acknowledged the significant impact the storm had on communities and individual homeowners and highlighted help available on a state level.

“You’ve heard me say this every time we have one of these situations. The legislature and their foresight working together, we’re able to put together disaster assistance contingency account. Meaning, if we don’t reach FEMA’s thresholds for these or wait for the federal government, the state of Minnesota has an account that will recharge. It has about $24 million in it now. It recharges to $50 million in October at the end of our year.”

Gov. Walz went on to explain that this account provides the ability, once a local disaster declaration is made, to got to the state where determinations are made and state funds are able to reimburse 75% of the cost to the public infrastructure that was impacted. He continued that state legislatures are already working on this process.

County Administrator Thomas Barry also spoke and took the time to highlight some individual efforts that went into storm response.

“Our emergency management director, Chris Muller for the county, and also the emergency manager for the city, Justin Sherwood, fire chief, have done an incredible job, manning the EOC, getting things up and running, getting our response going,” said Barry. “We knew immediately after we went and saw the devastation after the 120 mile an hour winds that had come through and a lot of people being displaced that we need to set up shelters. That’s an exercise we trained for just two months ago.”

“We were able to stand up a shelter really quickly with the help of our public health department, our health and human services department,” Barry continued. “We also had the Red Cross, we also had the city of Bemidji with the Sanford Center, and we also had the Salvation Army all work together and stand up a facility in very short order. We housed over 100 people the first evening.”

Concerning the clean up of debris, Bemidji Mayor Jorge Prince said that within the city limits, city staff is slowly working through free curbside pickups. Thomas Barry also addressed efforts being made on the county side.

“We have our demolition landfill that’s operating extensive hours at this point in time,” explained Barry. “We also opened up a new collection facility over at the old fairgrounds site right behind target. So people can take their debris there as well.”

A third, and potentially fourth, collection facility is also being planned. The details on the additional sites will be announced at a later time. Several townships in Beltrami County are also organizing their own pick ups, but Barry explained that the county to not have the staffing to do pick-ups county wide.

Craig Gaasvig, Chair of the Beltrami County Board of Commissioners, was also presented and thanked Beltrami Electric Cooperative, Otter Tail Power Company, and all of the surrounding power companies that came to assist from as far away as Bismarck, North Dakota. Gaasvig said ,at the height of the outages, nearly 20,000 were without power and that has now been reduced to around 500.