For part 3 of our talk with Mike Maurer, chief deputy and emergency management director for Blue Earth County, Mike tells us what we can do in our own homes to prepare for a disaster in rural Minnesota. Three days is key. 

EXCERPT: “Metropolitan areas in Minnesota and Wisconsin have seen significant declines in the number of impaired driving offenses, but the rate of drunken driving in rural areas remains high. Minnesota’s Dakota, Washington and Hennepin counties saw the steepest reductions in chronically impaired drivers between 2015 and 2016. Hennepin, Minnesota’s largest county, experienced nearly a 100-person ...

EXCERPT: “Hospital pharmacist Mandy Langston remembers when Lulabelle Berry arrived at the emergency center of Stone County Medical Center in Mountain View, Ark., last year. Berry couldn’t talk. Her face was drooping on one side. Her eyes couldn’t focus. ‘She was basically unresponsive,’ Langston recalls. Berry, 78, was having a severe ischemic stroke. Each passing second made brain ...

EXCERPT: “We’ve heard a lot about America’s struggling rural areas in the past year. Forgotten America, where men and women lead hardscrabble lives marked by poverty, lack of opportunity, addiction and despair. Rural America, we’ve been told, is falling behind: on everything from Internet access to health care to business to youth. But recent Census Bureau data suggests that some of these concerns, at least, may be overstated — particularly when it comes to ...

Last week we talked with Mike Maurer, Chief Deputy and Emergency Management Director for Blue Earth County, about disaster preparedness in rural communities. Mike joins us again to talk about a specific community, Lake Crystal, and how it managed major storm damage last year.

EXCERPT: “The number of people living in rural (nonmetro) counties stood at 46.1 million in July 2016—14 percent of all U.S. residents spread across 72 percent of the Nation’s land area. The rural population declined by 21,000 between July 2015 and July 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest population estimates, the sixth consecutive ...

EXCERPT: “A mentally ill person should not be treated for the disease in an emergency room. Or sitting in a jail. But that is what often happens in rural Minnesota, where there are not enough health care professionals such as psychiatrists to treat them. And there are not enough psychiatric hospital beds even if the ...

With hurricanes hitting the South and tornadoes in the Midwest, we thought we’d sit down with Mike Maurer, Chief Deputy and Emergency Management Director for Blue Earth County, to talk about disaster preparedness in rural communities.

EXCERPT: “State lawmakers joined members of the renewable energy industry Thursday to tout a new report about clean energy jobs in Minnesota and to call for a higher state energy standard. Lt. Gov. Tina Smith, together with Sens. Karin Housley, R-St. Mary’s Point, and Nick Frentz, DFL-North Mankato, gave a news conference with Clean Energy ...

EXCERPT: “Small-town hospitals and clinics may not have all the bells and whistles of their big-city counterparts, but they offer something patients often cannot find in the cities: quarterbacks. ‘You have a quarterback here,’ said Dr. Heidi Korstad, sitting in the cafeteria of Bigfork Valley, a sprawling medical complex of hospital, clinic, nursing home and ...