Storm hits area

Law agencies swamped with accident calls

I first started at the Bemidji (Minn.) Pioneer as an intern in the summer of 1996. That would begin six years as a news reporter, sports reporter and copy editor for a small, six-day-per-week daily newspaper in northern Minnesota. I wrote a large range of stories from multiple beats, to features to sports, my favorite being the coverage of the Red Lake Reservation High School basketball team named the Warriors. Here is a collection of my stories from my time at the Pioneer.

Nov. 28, 2001

By Devlyn Brooks

Staff Writer

Law enforcement agencies throughout central and northern Minnesota were swamped with calls concerning accidents and vehicles in ditches Tuesday, as a two-day storm finally relented and moved eastward.

Bemidji Police Chief Bruce Preece said his officers responded to a dozen accidents by mid-afternoon Tuesday, delaying the departments other work throughout the day.

The calls were coming in so fast, he added, that the department's animal control/community service officer and newly appointed Capt. Daryle Russell were pressed into hitting the streets.

"(A storm like that) puts us behind on other calls," Preece said, "and we just can't respond as fast to the other calls we receive."

Farther south in the Minnesota State Patrol district around Brainerd, which was closer to the center of the storm, troopers responded to 28 property damage accidents, six injury accidents and a fatal crash from Monday morning to Tuesday morning. In addition, a recording at the Brainerd State Patrol dispatch center said "many" cars were in ditches. Updated information for that district won't be available until this morning.

The havoc was wreaked by a slow moving surface low pressure system that encountered an upper-level low pressure system and became stalled, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Dave Kellenbenz in Grand Forks, N.D.

He said the two systems became "stacked" over southern Minnesota, slowing both systems to a crawl and causing the surface system to drop snow in a wide swath from northeastern South Dakota to the Minnesota Arrowhead and from Minneapolis to Bemidji.

"When the surface low pressure system and the upper low pressure system become stacked, they kind of jockey for position," he said. "They don't move much when that happens."

In Bemidji, rain started falling Monday morning and soon turned to sleet and eventually snow in the afternoon. By Monday night the storm, with its heavy snowfall and high winds, moved into the region.

By about 4 p.m. Tuesday, the system had dropped 5 to 6 inches of snow in much of northern Minnesota, with a sharp decrease in snowfall amounts to the west of Beltrami County.

In sharp contrast to their colleagues to the south, a dispatcher for the State Patrol office in Thief River Falls, Minn., which covers all of the state's northwestern counties, said she received few weather related calls Tuesday.

"There's been a few calls, but nothing much," she said. "It's been quiet."

"There was a sharp cutoff to the heavy snow. the snowfall amounts really decreased as you got to the northwest (Minnesota counties)," Kellenbenz said. "That happens when the storm is so far south."

The geographic band from Willmar, Minn., to St. Cloud, shouldered the brunt of the storm by far, Kellenbenz said. National Weather Service officials estimated that about 30 inches of snow fell in the Willmar area by Tuesday afternoon.

The storm there halted tractor-trailer rig traffic and led officials to recommend no travel.

Kellenbenz said the large snowfall accumulation statewide wasn't caused so much by the strength of the storm as by the duration of the storm.

"It wasn't that is snowed so hard," he said. "It was that it was ongoing for a day ... day and a half ... two days."

Kellenbenz said this region could feel a hangover from the storm again today as it continues to move eastward. Temperatures again will be low, with highs in the 20s, and snow flurries possible.

"That will be from the leftover upper-level system that hasn't moved out yet," he said.