BEMIDJI, Minn. — Erik Flowers has frequented Bemidji a time or two.

One of Brainerd’s paid on-call firefighters routinely finds himself in Beltrami County each spring for his day job. So when Flowers volunteered for a day-long firefighting shift in Bemidji in the wake of the severe storm on June 21, he was taken aback by the aftermath as he traveled up Highway 371.

“I was up in Bemidji this spring for a work conference; we go up every year. I’m familiar with the area,” Flowers said. “We got to Walker and the power was still out. I kind of thought, ‘This is a lot bigger than we imagined.’”

A fallen tree and powerline block traffic on Birchmont Beach Road N.E. following an early morning storm on June 21, 2025, in Northern Township, near Bemidji, Minn. Nineteen fire departments and roughly 100 traveling firefighters answered Bemidji’s call for help when Fire Chief Justin Sherwood sought a lifeline in the form of mutual aid. (TJ Rhodes / Forum News Service)

Flowers and the rest of the four-person crew didn’t know what was waiting for them 40 miles north of the halfway point between Bemidji and Brainerd.

“You get into Bemidji and you start seeing the damage from roofs being torn off on so many buildings and the amount of trees on the side of the road,” he said. “You’re just in awe of how much damage there is.”

Flowers’ shock matched that of roughly 100 traveling firefighters who answered Bemidji’s call for help. At about 8 a.m. on June 21, six hours after Category 3 hurricane winds tore the First City on the Mississippi apart, Bemidji Fire Chief Justin Sherwood sought a lifeline in the form of mutual aid.

“We have 10 mutual aid partners around us — Solway, Blackduck, etc.,” he said. “If they have a structure fire, they can request resources from Bemidji. For this event, we opened up intrastate requests so we could receive aid from everywhere. We had 19 departments come to assist us, all the way down to Bloomington and Little Canada.”

In a matter of hours after the storm dissipated, before any power was reestablished or emergency resource centers were posted, firefighters from Bemidji, the surrounding area and Greater Minnesota got their hands dirty in the early phase of a relief effort that will take weeks, if not months or years, to complete.

From gas leaks to structure fires, from the sense of helplessness to faith restoration, the preparation from statewide departments readied firefighters for the unpreparable.

Acting fast

Sherwood went to bed on Friday, June 20, anticipating being woken up with calls.

“You just get that feeling sometimes,” he said. “When you have a major storm, there’s often a structure fire. At minimum, you’re getting alarms. You just know it’s coming.”

Around 2 a.m. on Saturday, as Sherwood began his trek inside Bemidji’s city limits, he quickly learned that it wasn’t an average storm.

All available firefighters in the existing crew of 57 were paged in. Sherwood also said the department’s communications were down.

“I was really proud of my staff, because they had already coordinated dispatch logs,” he said. “They had all of the calls written down on pieces of paper because the dispatchers were so inundated with calls. They were prioritizing those logs on paper, and Chad Hokuf was dispatching rigs over the radio.”

Nineteen fire departments and roughly 100 traveling firefighters answered Bemidji’s call for help on June 21, 2025, hours after the city was damaged by severe storms. (Courtesy of the Bemidji Fire Department)

In the immediate eight hours following the storm, Bemidji firefighters responded to roughly 80 emergency calls. Each rig in the station was deployed to various areas of Bemidji, attending to gas leaks, dangerously fallen power lines and other time-sensitive fixes.

Sherwood was forced to delegate.

On his drive into Bemidji from his home in rural Beltrami County, he called in each city department lead for an emergency meeting at 3 a.m. Sherwood, also the city’s emergency manager, passed off the immediate recovery duties at the fire department to Hokuf.

“It was at that point when we identified the streets that needed to be opened and the injuries and casualties we had,” Sherwood said. “We didn’t have any, thank God. But it was dark, and there wasn’t power, so we didn’t even know what we had to work with.

“When you look at it from an administrator’s point of view, like myself, I was thinking more long term. I knew we couldn’t sustain this pace, and what if the ‘what ifs’ happen?”

At 8 a.m., one of them happened.

Bat signal

Due to a building explosion on the north side of Bemidji near Sanford, the fire department was suddenly strapped for bodies.

In times of desperation, local fire departments can reach out to their mutual aid partners for help. In extreme cases, like Bemidji’s, requests through the Minnesota Intrastate Mutual Aid Plan are formed.

Chiefs from around the state assess their departments to see if they can send a crew where it’s needed on short notice.

Sherwood also reached out to the Minnesota State Fire Chiefs Association for assistance. Hibbing Chief Erika Jankila; Cross Lake Chief Chip Lohmiller; Pequot Lakes Chief Mike Schwankl; Cross Lake Deputy Chief Jory Danielson; Plymouth Chief Rodger Coppa; Brooklyn Park Chief Tim Walsh; Bloomington Deputy Chief Jay Forster; Little Canada Chief Don Smiley; and Brooklyn Center Chief Todd Berg all provided aid to Bemidji in the days following the storm.

Due to the scale of the destruction, several department authority figures were needed.

“I knew our resources were going to be tapped,” Sherwood said. “We couldn’t sustain what we were doing. We pulled the pin in the mutual aid grenade, if you will, and called Blackduck, Solway and Cass Lake. But I also had to be mindful of what their communities had going on. This became a state event.”

Sherwood came away impressed with how quickly they responded to the call to service in northern Minnesota.

Solway Fire Department workers wait for barbecue during during a meal event on June 24, 2025, at the Beltrami County Administration Building. (Sarah Suchoski / Forum News Service)

“I made one phone call to a supervisor at the state fire marshal’s office,” he said. “I told him what I needed, and he said, ‘I got you.’ He told me they had six fire departments signed up for three days each, and if I needed anything else, they’d get it for me. That was done within hours.

“It just blows my mind how fast it all came together. How did they get here that fast? How were they even able to pack that fast? It’s hard to understand, but it makes you so proud of what you do. We’re the state of community.”

While stations from around Minnesota boarded their trucks, a crew in Detroit Lakes was short on bodies.

Mike Hansen, the Detroit Lakes fire chief, didn’t have four people to send to Bemidji. He teamed up with Fergus Falls to provide aid.

“When I called their chief, Ryan Muckow, he said they had the manpower but they were down an engine,” Hansen said. “I told him that we had the engine but we didn’t have the manpower. He sent us two guys and we put them on our engine.”

Hansen is familiar with mutual aid and intrastate requests. He understands that rural towns in Greater Minnesota don’t have the infrastructure to survive the aftermath of the June 21 storm alone.

“I don’t even know if there was a reaction,” Hansen said. “All of us are trained. We know when to call for help, and we know when not to call for help. When one of the other chiefs calls for help, you don’t ask questions. You just do it because you know it’s needed, and you might need it, too, at some point.”

Gas leaks

With an influx of emergency calls rolling through the dispatchers — calls that were being documented on pen and paper, as the town was without power — Bemidji firefighters leaned on their mission statement.

“It’s to protect life, then property, then the environment,” Sherwood said. “Life safety is No. 1. That’s how we prioritize calls. In everything that was done, that was the priority. It wasn’t until the daylight came that we started shifting. … For us, a lot of the life safety things were gas leaks, lines down and collapses.”

In a standard June week, gas leak calls are few and far between. In the 10 days following the storm, Sherwood guessed that Bemidji received 50 to 60 calls about gas leaks.

“We work our way out from the hot zone through our monitoring systems,” Sherwood said. “You have to identify the type of gas — natural gas or propane gas — which have different kinds of gravities. Natural gas is lighter than air and will dissipate, whereas propane gas sinks low. We identify those things and act accordingly.”

Gas leaks can arise from virtually all areas in a community. In the restoration process, more leaks than the original source can be found.

“You think about the amount of wind we had, it moves and shakes things,” Sherwood said. “We had gas leaks on top of Lueken’s and Walmart. That’s where their appliances are. Trees had fallen on power lines, so we took care of those. Then we turn the gas back on and identify more leaks.”

New normal

Since pushing through the immediate recovery phase, Sherwood is turning his department’s attention toward regaining a semblance of regularity.

He is a believer in leading by example. He understands that while some community members will endure an ongoing struggle in the coming months, reestablishing structure in his department is paramount.

“It’s important to say that there are so many community members who weren’t thriving before the storm,” Sherwood said. “They were struggling, whether it be financially or otherwise. At the very least, we need to get people back to a place of familiarity. It’s going to take patience, grace, resiliency, love — a lot of outward stuff.

“From the fire department’s point of view, we’re of the mindset that, right now, we’re in the recovery stage. The recovery items that happen right now don’t involve us unless there’s an injury or something like that. We’re working on recognizing what our new normal is now. … We’re going to continue to support our service organizations here in Bemidji.”

Sherwood has also had time to reflect. In a time where it feels like Bemidji drew the short end of the weather stick, he understands how lucky Bemidjians got with the lack of casualties.

“I think a big part of that is because of the time the storm came,” Sherwood said. “People were at home in their beds or found shelter. The sirens went off and gave people enough of a heads up to retreat somewhere safe. But when you wake up and see the damage the next morning, you expect multiple casualties, whether that’s injury or death.”

As for the visiting firefighters who volunteered their efforts in the days following the storm, Flowers leaned on the unspoken code among first responders.

Firefighters from all over the state came to Bemidji to provide assistance after storms devastated the area in the early morning hours of June 21, 2025. (Courtesy of the Bemidji Fire Department)

“Most firefighters have that deep level of service and a commitment to helping others,” he said. “It’s not constrained to a boundary or a state, or any of that kind of thing. For me, I feel like I was born to serve others.

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“Every time I try to branch out in my career that isn’t paid-on-call firefighting, it always leads back to serving others. I believe stuff like this goes so far beyond the boundaries of our own town in Brainerd.”

It isn’t lost on Sherwood that the town-shaping disaster could take an emotional toll on his crew. He called himself “passionate” in his leadership style, and the response of his counterparts in a time of need reaffirmed his enthusiasm for what he does.

“For them to leave their lives and families, to leave what they had damaged and lost from this storm, all to help other people, I couldn’t ask for anything more out of them,” Sherwood said. “We didn’t just see this with emergency staff; we saw it throughout the community. People came out and assisted their neighbors before they helped themselves. That’s why you can drive down these streets today.”

Sitting in the chair at Accolades Salon Spa in St. Paul, Nabella Grijalva held out her phone to show the hairstylist some of the ideas she had for her big day on June 27.

On the other side of the room, Nabella’s grandmother Blanca Grijalva closed her eyes while a woman applied her makeup.

When she was Nabella’s age, Blanca did her own hair and makeup for her own quinceañera celebration — a traditional commemoration of a girl’s 15th birthday held by many Latino families.

“I had seen this girl have one, and it was really pretty. I wanted one, but I didn’t know if I could have one,” Blanca told the Pioneer Press when the paper covered her quinceañera celebration in 1985.

Now 40 years later, some parts of the day are a little more extravagant for Nabella’s celebration, held the day after her birthday. Blanca has been preparing for the last two years.

“When Bella came along, I just always, I’m like, ‘Well, we’re gonna have a quinceañera for you one day,’ because I didn’t have girls of my own,” Blanca said. “And that was what I grew up with traditionally, the whole concept of it, I guess. The religious aspect of it, the food, the dance, just the whole tradition, just the way it’s celebrated, was just really important. And to get your family members together. And to celebrate her, because it’s about her.”

Over the years, Nabella’s dad often asked her if she wanted a quinceañera celebration or the money for it. Nabella knew she wanted the celebration.

“I’ve known exactly what theme and what dress I wanted since I was like 8 years old, so I guess that dream definitely did come true,” she said.

Blanca’s quinceañera celebration

With a little help from Linda Velasques, left, and Lillian Velasques, Blanca Grijalva, née Blanca Estela Santana, is ready to receive congratulations at her quinceañera in St. Paul on May 10, 1985. (Liz Hafalia / Pioneer Press)

Forty years ago, when Blanca celebrated turning 15 years old, her friends – 14 girls and 15 boys – marched ahead of her down the aisle of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on St. Paul’s West Side. The teenage Blanca followed in a white dress and veil, a bouquet of flowers in her hand and her parents on each side. Her father, Victorio Santana, made a special trip to Mexico to buy the dress.

For the family, the celebration was an important Mexican custom and a symbol that Blanca had stayed loyal to her religious faith.

“Everybody thought she deserved this party,” Santana told the Pioneer Press in 1985. “She is like the perfect child in everybody’s eyes. This is something we could give her.”

For Nabella’s family, the celebration is also a symbol of moving into a new phase in life, one with more responsibility and freedom.

“This party, this quinceañera signifies, for me personally, the next step in life,” said Jesús Grijalva, Nabella’s uncle.

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At Blanca’s celebration, more than a dozen sets of godparents paid for much of the party, including the clothes, reception room rentals, cake, music, photographs and flowers. The food was a homemade meal of mole, rice and beans made by Blanca’s mom and friends.

Now, more of the financial responsibility falls on immediate family members, Blanca said. It can be significant – while Blanca’s quinceañera dress cost her father $100, Nabella’s was $1,900. It’s just one of the changes in the 40 years since Blanca had her celebration.

“But back then, we didn’t do the surprise dances or anything. We just did, like, the presentation of the godparents and then the waltz. And there was a lot of godparents back then, but now that’s kind of gone away,” Blanca said. “So most people, I think, that have them now just kind of take care of the whole thing themselves.”

Her father had a lot of friends to help him with the preparations, she said.

The tradition and religious aspect of the celebration was an important part of that day for her father, she added.

“I knew it was important, especially to my dad,” Blanca said.

Nabella’s day

Gracyella Rivera makes sure Nabella “Bella” Grijalva’s hair will stay in place as she applies hairspray before Bella’s quinceañera party at the Intercontinental Hotel in St. Paul on Friday, June 27, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

The day of a quinceañera is spent preparing for the evening’s celebrations.

With her hair and makeup done, Nabella dons her red and black quinceañera dress and takes a limo to the Cathedral of St. Paul for pictures with her damas – the five girls who make up her court. Nabella chose not to have any boys on her court – the girls’ green dresses go better with the green accents in Nabella’s dress.

More of the day is spent visiting different parts of the city for photos before heading to the Intercontinental St. Paul Riverfront hotel downtown. There, Nabella and her friends do last-minute touch-ups on their hair and talk about anything from the popular video game Roblox to their families’ homemade tortillas.

The girls are nervous, but prepared. They joke about ordering food delivery if they don’t have enough time to eat during the festivities. They’ve spent weeks preparing their dances for the evening. Being a part of Nabella’s court is an honor, they said.

Nabella asked her friend Gracyella Rivera to be a part of her court when they were just 8 years old.

“We were childhood best friends,” Rivera said. “And we still are, and we were playing in our living room, and we would always talk about having a quince and her having one, and how she would want it ranchero-style — she did have it like that — and she asked me that time, and then it just stuck. Someone actually had it. It was just like living a childhood dream.”

Outside the room, the guests socialize and eat food from the buffet while a mariachi group plays. Men wear big hats and belt buckles as part of that ranchero-style theme, which Nabella described as a cowboy, Hispanic-Western style.

The girls get ready for their grand entrance with Nabella’s family. The mariachi band plays them in to applause and cheers.

Blanca had tried to secure a church for a blessing of Nabella, but many don’t host quinceañeras on Fridays. So a chaplain offers a blessing at the hotel venue, that Nabella may grow in wisdom, knowledge and grace, with love and faithfulness for her family and friends. She is gifted a Bible and rosary. Other gifts include jewelry, as well as high heels and a teddy bear to symbolize her transition from childhood into young womanhood.

Nabella and her friends sit at a long table at the front of the room, with Nabella’s name largely displayed in lights. They mingle with guests. It’ll be sad when the celebration is over, but it’s happy, too, they said.

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Near the end of the evening, Nabella and her 9-year-old sister Amaia switch from dresses to jeans, crowns still on their heads, for a coordinated dance they’ve been practicing for weeks. When Nabella’s dad asked her if she wanted a quinceañera celebration or the money, she knew she wanted the celebration — but she thinks Amaia will pick the money to travel. Either way, they have this dance together.

“It’s been very fun. I mean, definitely kind of stressful. But I love every night just practicing our dances in the living room, making sure to get it down and having good laughs throughout this very stressful time,” Nabella said. “It’s just fun. I love getting more time with my family than just us being cooped in our rooms. So I love that. I also feel like I built a better connection with my sister throughout this whole process.”

(Courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers)

SALLY FRANSON: Minnesota author discusses her novels “Big In Sweden” and “A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out” in the Union Depot’s Stories at the Station reading series presented by Story Line Books. Free. 6 p.m. Thursday, Union Depot, 214 E. Fourth St., St. Paul.

JONATHAN HIGGINS: Presents “Fat, Black, Femme” in conversation with Chris Stedman. 7 p.m. Tuesday, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

MARIS KRETZMAN: Cultural critic discusses her debut essay collection, “I Want to Burn This Place Down,” in conversation with Steph Opitz. 7 p.m. Thursday, Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls.

TODD OTIS: Former member of the Minnesota House of Representatives discusses his novel “Sparks of the Revolution: James Otis and the Birth of American Democracy,” inspired by his distant ancestor’s participation in actions that led to the American Revolution. In conversation with David Unowsky. 7 p.m. Tuesday, SubText Books, 6 W. Fifth St., St. Paul.

MIDSTREAM READING SERIES: Readings of original works by Donna Isaac, Jim Johnson, Paula Cisewski and Diego Vasques Jr., hosted by Diane Jarvenpa. Free. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Unity Church-Unitarian, 732 Holly Ave., St. Paul.

What else is going on?

Community of Literary Magazines and Presses awarded the 2025 Firecracker award to “Obligations to the Wounded” by Minnesota writer Mubanga Kalimamukwento (University of Pittsburgh Press). Judges for the awards, which celebrate the best of independently published literature, wrote of the novel: “Seldom does fiction so expertly capture the complications of queerness, family, dislocation, and culture… a stunning work of compassionate art worthy of our attention and emotions.” Kalimamukwento founded Ubwali Literary Magazine, co-founded the virtual Idembeka Creative Writing Workshop and is a mentor at the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

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This Thursday we’ll have our first full moon of astronomical summer but for all practical purposes the moon will be pretty much full all week long. As much as full moons louse up the skies for real stargazing and astrophotography, two things near and dear to me, I just love, love, love full moons! I’ve been known to stay up way too late relaxing on my deck, bathing under the light of the full moon. I call it my magic moon time.

As with all full moons, I love the names given to them by cultures all over the world. Some of the old-time American and Native American names for the July full moon include the full buck moon because this time of year buck deer begin sprouting out new antlers. It’s also called the thunder moon because of more frequent thunderstorms this time of year. My favorite name for the July full moon comes from ancient Chinese Buddhist tradition. They called it the Hungry Ghost moon.

Whatever you call the July full moon you can’t help but notice that it’s a low rider. July full moons don’t rise very high in the sky. They take the same low arc across the southern sky as the sun does as winter begins. This makes sense because this time of year the sun takes a very high arc across the southern sky during the day, and since the full moon is on the opposite side of the sky from the sun it just makes sense that it would be a low rider in the southern heavens in the good old summertime. That’s one of the reasons I like full moon gazing this time of year. You can enjoy it for an extended time without craning your neck nearly as much

Not only is it nice to gaze upon the moon in July, but you can also have a lot of fun taking pictures of it. You don’t even need that fancy of a camera. Even your smartphone can do a pretty good job if you do it right. Apps like ProShop and NightCap can really help with light and exposure control so the image isn’t just a washout of white.

Crescent moon (Mike Lynch)

If you really want to do it right, I suggest investing in either the new ZWO Seestar S30 or S50 All-in-One Smart Telescopes. Not only can you get amazing moon shots, but you can also capture star clusters, galaxies, nebulae, the sun, and even great terrestrial images. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, there’s a telescope revolution going on right now. These lower-cost photographic telescopes are becoming at least as popular as conventional visual scopes. For generally less than $600, you can purchase a photographic telescope controlled remotely with your smartphone or iPad. You can’t look through these scopes but instead you take celestial images with them. They have a real advantage over visual scopes because you see so much more in the way of color and detail in the photos you take than what you can see looking through the eyepiece of a traditional scope. And again, you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg. For example, the ZWO SeeStar S30 is only $349, and a great place to order one is Starizona in Tucson at www.starizona.com

You can also take some amazing pictures of the moon through the eyepiece of even a small to moderate visual telescope. Just hold your camera or your smartphone over the eyepiece as steady as you can. That can be a bit of a challenge. My suggestion is just keep hitting the shutter button or icon and hopefully you’ll get some decent shots. If possible, rig up a tripod or something else to help steady your camera or smartphone over the eyepiece.

Along with keeping the telescope steady, another thing that’s important is to start taking your shots through a low-magnification eyepiece with your telescope. That’ll have a much wider aperture than a high-magnification eyepiece. Once you get some low-magnification shots, see what you do with higher-magnification eyepieces.

To be honest full moons are not my favorite to photograph through a telescope. I actually prefer pictures of the moon at other various phases in its cycle. Crescent moons, half moons and even gibbous (football-shaped) moons are all fun to photograph. You can see more detail especially along what’s known as the terminator. That’s the line that divides the sunlit part of the moon from the darkened portion.

Once you get the photos, you can work with them with the editing functions on your phone or even software like Photoshop to make your captures look even better, but not fake. You can really see details in the dark maria or plains on the moon as well as the mountains and craters. You’ll want to share them, use them as screensavers, or even hang them on your wall! One more thing that makes gazing at the moon or photographing it so special this month is what happened in July, 56 years ago, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first human steps on the moon. I hope we go back there someday!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

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