Star Tribune
Firefighters gain on Bogus Lake fire near Grand Marais, Minnesota, but Forest Service warns of possibility for more
Crews have contained a 53-acre wildlfire near Grand Marais in the Superior National Forest, the Forest Service reported Friday, while they continue to fight two others.
Forest Service and Department of Natural Resources crews in the air and on the ground have fought the fire in a remote and densely wooded area about 20 miles northeast of Grand Marais. The fire was discovered Tuesday. Its cause is unknown.
The wildfire prompted the agency earlier this week to extend its campfire ban to the entire national forest. A fire ban in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness took effect Oct. 1. The DNR reports the current fire danger is “very high” in northern St. Louis and Lake counties. Burning restrictions have expanded, too, covering Cook, Koochiching, Lake, and the northern half of St. Louis County.
A wildfire was detected Monday on the eastern side of Shell Lake, about 4 miles north of Road 116 within the BWCAW, in St. Louis County. Covering three-quarters of an acre, the fire has some potential to spread to the east near Agawato Lake and a portion of the Sioux-Hustler Hiking Trail, the Forest Service reported. The fire’s cause is unknown.
Elsewhere in the Boundary Waters, crews continue to fight a fire at Wood Lake. The fire, discovered Sept. 10, has grown to 45 acres and is 50% contained. Its cause is under investigation.
Forest Service spokesperson Joy Liptak VanDrie said moisture is needed to lessen the harsh drought conditions and to keep fires from sparking, rekindling or spreading. The National Weather Service forecasts a mixed chance of showers across the Arrowhead region Saturday night and into Sunday.
“If weather doesn’t bring moisture, we will have more fires next week,” she said.
Liptak VanDrie said Forest Service staff have found “too many abandoned campfires with warm coals … these will ignite in current conditions.”
Star Tribune
Boeing will lay off 10% of its employees as a strike by factory workers cripples airplane production
Boeing plans to lay off about 10% of its workers in the coming months as it continues to lose money and tries to deal with a strike that is crippling production of the company’s best-selling airline planes.
New CEO Kelly Ortberg told staff in a memo Friday that the job cuts will include executives, managers and employees.
The company had already imposed rolling temporary furloughs, but Ortberg said those will be suspended because of the impending layoffs.
The company will delay the rollout of a new plane, the 777X, to 2026 instead of 2025. It will also stop building the cargo version of its 767 jet in 2027 after finishing current orders.
Boeing has lost more than $25 billion since the start of 2019. Union machinists have been on strike since Sept. 14. Two days of talks this week failed to produce a deal.
Many Minnesotans who have homes in Florida escaped the worst of the damage from the latest hurricane to batter the Southeast coast.
Hurricane Milton, which made landfall Wednesday, killed at least eight people. The storm, predicted to be a Category 5, weakened to Category 3 but had sustained winds of 120 mph. It also arrived in Florida just one week after Category 4 Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 230 people across several states, according to the Associated Press.
A large contingent of Minnesota snowbirds who live in Naples, Fla. — about two hours south of Sarasota, which bore the hurricane head on — did not see as much destruction as storms from years past, said Mike Schumann, who resides in St. Louis Park during the warm months. Florida has long attracted Minnesotans for its warm winters and spring training baseball, as the Minnesota Twins train in Fort Myers, on the gulf coast and about a 45-minute drive from Naples.
As Schumann traveled on a long-planned trip to Germany during the storm, his home and furniture store in Naples were at the top of his mind. Schumann streamed a local news station based in Naples and received updates from his neighbors who decided to hunker down and brave the storm.
“We were on pins and needles all night,” he said the day after the storm. “My neighbors were kind of crazy to try to ride this one out. But based on the pictures they sent us of our home, this was not as bad.”
Schumann, who was on his way back to Minnesota from his trip, said he was going to wait until the power was back on and hurricane relief efforts settled down before he heads back to check on the state of his properties.
“We got really lucky,” he said. “A lot of people thought it was going to be significantly worst than it was.”
Naples, once described as ‘a warm Edina,’ has such a large Minnesota population, that in the 1960s, Minnesotans formed a weekly winter breakfast club that still meets with Minnesota politicians and CEOS.
The unpleasant odor is caused by fertilizer and manure that is placed on farms surrounding the metro area, and it is a common occurrence in the fall. According to David Brown, an air quality meteorologist for the state, the manure smell has arrived early this year, potentially stretching out the amount of time it will be here to stay.
Typically, the smell becomes noticeable in November when new fertilizer is put down. But Brown said that the historically dry weather in recent weeks could be causing the smell to arrive earlier.
“It does seem a little bit early this fall, and that may be because of the drought conditions, the drier soils, dust and those soils are more easily lifted into the atmosphere by gusty wind,” Brown said.
He noted that the fertilizer smell does not decrease air quality or make it harmful to participate in outdoor activities.
“It’s more of just a nuisance,” Brown said, adding that the smell is likely to linger until below-freezing temperatures set in.
The air quality has been listed as “moderate” in recent days in the southern half of Minnesota, Brown said, slightly worsened by wildfire smoke coming from Wyoming and Idaho.
Mike Griesinger, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Chanhassen, said manure smell in the Twin Cities is “very common” because of how many farms surround the region.
