By State › Minnesota

Minnesota: Overview

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Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Minnesota exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Minnesota go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

The 1997 Red River flood: catastrophic damage, zero deaths

In April 1997, the Red River of the North crested at 54 feet in Grand Forks, 5 feet above the National Weather Service’s own worst-case estimate, flooding East Grand Forks, Minnesota and neighboring Grand Forks, North Dakota so completely that all but eight homes in East Grand Forks were damaged. More than 50,000 people evacuated, and total damage reached $3.5-3.6 billion, at the time the eighth-costliest flood in U.S. history. Despite the scale, no deaths resulted, a genuine success story for early warning and evacuation that stands in useful contrast to disasters elsewhere on this site where warning time or evacuation execution fell short. See the Risks page for the full data.

The 1991 Halloween Blizzard: a storm that broke its own category

On October 31, 1991, a blizzard dropped 28.4 inches of snow on the Twin Cities and 36.9 inches on Duluth, still the largest single-storm snowfall total in Minnesota history more than three decades later. The storm killed roughly 20-22 people and arrived astonishingly early in the season, an unusual combination of scale and timing that caught much of the state unprepared for a storm of that magnitude in October.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Minnesota: households along the Red River Valley and other flood-prone waterways should take early evacuation orders seriously, 1997 shows how effective that response can be, and winter storm preparedness needs to start before the conventional winter season does, the Halloween Blizzard demonstrates that Minnesota’s worst snowstorms don’t wait for a calendar date.

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