Pounded by storms and scorched by the sun, Minnesota is limping its way out of July.
Week after week, the state has been pummeled by tornadoes, floods, thunderstorms, baseball-sized hail and winds strong enough to topple trees and peel roofs off buildings. Natural disasters hit so fast and so frequently in recent weeks that the news cycle moved on before families and communities had time to tally everything they'd lost.
In the Boundary Waters last week, a ferocious storm swept over a group of campers on a Boy Scout outing. Falling trees killed a 13-year-old boy and an adult volunteer and injured others. Families and businesses in Litchfield and Watkins are still sifting through the debris from tornadoes that tore through, obliterating several homes and badly damaging many others.
Pine County is still assessing the damage from the worst flash floods the region has seen since 2012, when storms washed seals out of the Duluth Zoo and into city streets. In Sturgeon Lake, Holly Staples is helping her parents salvage what they can from the floodwaters that swept through their home, destroying everything for the second time in four years.
"Bad things happen to good people," said Staples, who has spent long days working through sweltering heat and swarming mosquitoes to sift through the waterlogged wreckage of the cozy three-bedroom log home by the Moose Horn River. Her parents, Thomas and Judith Koch, had just finished rebuilding from the 2012 flood damage. "But bad things don't usually happen twice in four years, where you lose everything you own. Everything.
"It's a tough pill to swallow," she added, "when you walk into your house and your refrigerator is floating and your family heirlooms and photos are floating."
Minnesota Homeland Security and Emergency Management is working with 12 counties in central Minnesota and seven more in the Arrowhead region to assess storm damage and determine eligibility for state disaster assistance. Itasca County and the Leech Lake Reservation have already requested state disaster aid.
The Minnesota Climatology Working Group keeps a running storm tally. This month's list starts on July 5, when more than 6 inches of rain fell near Morris. Less than a week later, heavy rains pushed rivers, creeks and lakes over their banks in Pine, Morrison, Aitkin, Cass, Crow Wing, Benton, Mille Lacs, Kanabec and Carlton counties, washing out roads, closing highways and spawning tornadoes in Meeker County.
