I spent several years on a fire department during my service years, and in that time I spent time on a fireline both at structural fires and on occasion grass fires in farm country. Out here that means the same crew that pulls a family out of a house fire is also the one racing a grass fire down a dry ditch line in a summer like this one, watching it jump a road because the wind decided it should. So when I look at what’s happening up in the Boundary Waters, I’m not reading it off a press release. I know what that fire line feels like, and I know how thin the crews fighting it are stretched.
On July 6 a storm crossed northeastern Minnesota and threw down more than a thousand lightning strikes with almost no rain behind them. The forest was bone dry and caught fire. Two weeks later, fifteen fires are still burning across the Superior National Forest, more than 70,000 acres have burned across the forest and into Canada, and the largest of them jumped the border itself.[1][2] The Boundary Waters is closed now under an order that runs into October. Crews are working structure protection around cabins and resorts, and my friend’s department is offering mutual aid. As one of the fire’s own meteorologists put it, these fires will be here until it snows.[3]
You didn’t have to be up in the Arrowhead to feel it. On July 16 Minneapolis had the worst air of any city in the world, and the reading in parts of northern Minnesota climbed past 1,000 on a scale where 300 is considered hazardous.[4] That smoke settled over every one of the six counties I’m running to represent. Park Rapids and Walker, Long Prairie and Staples, Wadena, and clear across from Becker County to Morrison. Kids kept inside. Folks with bad lungs told to stay home. The fires are two hundred miles away, but the impact doesn’t stop at the county line.
You can’t legislate lightning away, and I won’t tell you a bill keeps the sky clear. But this isn’t a freak accident anymore. Red flag warnings in July used to be rare. Big summer fires used to be rare. The drought that primed this forest, the heat that came with it, the season that keeps stretching longer, that’s the pattern climate change is writing across this state while the people who profit from the root causes keep telling us nothing can be done. Plenty can be done.
The state senate has real levers, and most come down to whether we pay before the fire or after it.
I. Fund the people who fight these.
In the first days, before help arrived, the DNR and the Forest Service were stretched thin, and one official said it plain, we only have so many resources to go around.[5] It took more than a thousand firefighters, an incident management team from outside the region, and resources from both sides of the border to catch up.[6] Whether we have those people ready is a budget choice, not a law of nature. Seasonal crews, aircraft, and the mutual-aid agreements that move help across county lines, state lines, and international borders save far more than they cost, every time. If you’ve ever thanked a firefighter, funding them is how you honor their sacrifice.
II. Protect people from the smoke while it’s here.
A clean-air shelter is just a school gym or a community center with good filtration, open to anybody who needs to breathe. We run warming shelters in winter. We can run these in a smoke event and help nursing homes, schools, and food shelves put in the filters.
III. Finish the work on the cause.
Minnesota already passed the law to reach clean electricity by 2040. The job now is to hold that line against the folks who want it rolled back, and against a rush of data centers. Twelve are planned that would add more than 1,100 megawatts, better than twenty times the data-center power running in the state today, and a single one of them would use about twice the water of the town beside it.[7] Let the biggest tech companies jump the line for cheap power, and we keep the coal and gas plants running past their time while the people downwind pay for it in smoke. The resilience money should go to farmers and small towns, not to whoever hires the fanciest grant writer.
These are just three solutions to the problem. The north woods and the fields here at home are one economy and one place. We take care of it together or we lose it in pieces. This one’s close enough to smell.
Sources
- Superior NF & July Lightning Wildfires Fact Sheet (updated July 24) — MNICS
- Northern Minnesota wildfire update, July 22 — CBS Minnesota
- Boundary Waters fires could burn until it snows — Star Tribune
- Twin Cities air quality alert, July 2026 — CBS Minnesota
- Officials issue more evacuations as wildfires grow — KARE 11
- More than 1,000 firefighters now working Superior NF fires — FOX 21
- What’s up with data centers in Minnesota — Fresh Energy