Star Tribune
Minnesota snowbirds dealing with hurricane damage again as storms batter Florida
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.
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.
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.
Minnesotans know that portaging a canoe is all part of a journey, and for a Shakopee woman, it proved a trip to both recovery and a world record at the Ely Marathon in September.
A year ago, Victoria Ranua, then 43, had lost her husband, the father of her two sons, to pulmonary fibrosis and complications of COVID. Then a bout of long COVID herself had left her in a fog that wouldn’t lift. She had been living in Tower, on the Iron Range, but returned to her home in Shakopee last year to find the house she had rented out had sustained thousands of dollars in damages. “It was definitely the lowest point of my life,” she recalls.
She found her path back by going back to her roots. In 1997, Ranua was a state champion in the 3,200-meter who went on to run cross-country and the steeplechase for the University of Minnesota for four years. It was during retreats with the university cross country team at Camp Voyageur, outside Ely, that she first experienced the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, where the canoe portage is part of the experience.
“I loved it the moment I stepped out of the vehicle,” she said of her first visit.
But after college, she married, had children and began a career. In 2017, her husband, Todd, received his terminal diagnosis. Wanting to spend his final years in the north country, they bought a house in Soudan.
There, she started running again and completed the Ely Half Marathon in 2022, several months after Todd’s death.
Back in Shakopee, she saw the offer of a $5,000 cash prize for breaking the world record in the canoe portage, part of the Ely Marathon. She decided to not just run it but also to beat the world record and claim the cash.
Only one other woman had ever finished the canoe portage marathon, running the course in 6 hours, 49 minutes. What’s more, at age 44, Ranua would be the oldest person to ever attempt the grueling contest.
