The Return on Readiness: An Oral History about a Massive Wind Storm, an Emergency Shelter, and the Beltrami County Team that was Ready to Go

How investing in preparedness helped Beltrami County Public Health and Emergency Management respond to their community when disaster struck in June 2025

Public Health System Transformation Update Newsletter
August 31, 2026 | View all system transformation newsletters

Jump to: 
Act I: The storm hits
June 20-21, 2025, overnight: "This is a real phone call"
Act II: Flashback: A well-timed practice run
April 2025: "Let's hope we never have to do this in real life"
Act III: The response
June 21, early morning: "The Sanford Center's open"
June 21, mid-morning: "I need 100 sandwiches by noon"
June 21, late evening: "My feet hurt, and I felt guilty"
June 22: "Hey kid, what do you need?"
June 23-26: "If somebody needed help, we helped them"
Act IV: After the storm
July 2025 to today: "The blessing of the storm"
July 2025 to today: "We do these things so we're prepared"

Bemidji is the county seat of Beltrami County in Northwestern Minnesota. Nearly 50,000 people live in the greater Bemidji area.

On June 20-21, 2025, a powerful overnight storm system brought a derecho with winds over 100 mph to northwestern Minnesota, causing widespread damage and prolonged power outages in the Bemidji area.

As dawn broke on Bemidji, Beltrami County Emergency Manager Chris Muller asked Public Health Director Amy Bowles to stand up an emergency shelter for residents who had lost power, food, and water. 

Just a few months earlier, Amy’s team had practiced doing exactly that—standing up an emergency shelter. During the next week and beyond, the Beltrami County Public Health team would make sure Bemidji residents had food, water, and—for a few days—a place to stay until it was safe to go back home.

Left: Amy Bowles, Public Health Director and Community Health Services Administrator, Beltrami County. Right: Chris Muller, Emergency Manager and Public Information Officer, Beltrami County. Credit: Submitted.

Act I: The storm hits 

“This is a real phone call” 

Friday-Saturday, June 20-21, 2025, overnight

As the storm rolled in on the evening of Friday, June 20, 2025, Beltrami County Public Health Director Amy had a hard time turning off the weather reports, but as a habitually early riser she knew she should get some sleep.

Amy Bowles (Bemidji County Public Health Director): I watched the storm roll in at midnight, said “I better lie down.” 

Chris Muller, a self-professed weather nerd, had been watching the forecast for days as the likelihood of severe weather grew. As Beltrami County’s emergency manager and public information officer, Chris is the cornerstone of the county’s work to prepare for and respond to emergencies and disasters like fires, floods, and storms.

Chris Muller (Beltrami County Emergency Management Director): Watching the messaging coming out from the [NOAA] Storm Prediction Center and subsequently from our local National Weather Service office—they were trying to signal that there's something significant that could happen.

It was Friday afternoon, Friday evening, when we started [seeing] the North Dakota impacts that eventually migrated into Minnesota. I came to our 911 dispatch center and was there as a resource if they needed; little did I know that I'd be grabbing a headset and answering 911 calls for the next five hours.

The National Weather Service tracked the derecho by radar as it traveled across the Upper Midwest, and estimates Northwestern Minnesota sustained hours of winds ranging from 60 to 120mph winds—the equivalent of a category 3 hurricane. Credit: National Weather Service, Grand Forks.

At 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, June 21, Chris called Amy and asked her to make her way into the Emergency Operations Center in Bemidji, where staff would coordinate the city’s response to damage yet unknown.

Amy: Chris called me, I think it was four in the morning, and he said, “This is a real phone call. Once you get your bearings, come to the emergency operations center, and we're gonna need you to set up a shelter. The storm hit hard last night.” That, of course, woke my husband up and he asked, “Do you need to go in?” and I said, “Yup.”

We didn't have electricity, so I didn’t have water, I couldn't shower, I couldn’t brush my teeth, so I changed my clothes. By the time that I changed my clothes and, like, orientated myself, my husband had cut up enough trees for me to get out of the driveway.

Chris: The only reason that I was able to get here [to the emergency operations center] as quickly is because I was already here. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to get here because there were so many trees and so many structures that were damaged and lying in the road. It took hours for us to get even the first arterial roads open so that we could start getting people out.

Amy: I didn't realize somewhere along the way into town I got a flat tire, and I was like “well, whatever, we’ll figure that out later.”
When I arrived at the Emergency Operations Center, Chris said, “We're going to all go meet over at the fire station and we’ll disperse from there. We're still trying to get a hold of somebody to see if we can use the Sanford Center [as an emergency shelter].”

Act II: Flashback: A well-timed practice run

“Let’s hope we never have to do this in real life”

April 2025

Exactly two months to the day before the derecho hit, Beltrami County staff had practiced holding an emergency shelter in the Sanford Center in downtown Bemidji. 

Since Amy joined Beltrami County Public Health as its director two years before, she and Chris had worked to grow the connections between public health and emergency management. 

Amy: You know when you meet someone and you just connect? I don't even remember how we first met or our first conversation, but somehow Chris and I—we just connected.

Chris: Amy reached out to talk about where our job duties and responsibilities overlapped, and made partnership a priority—how public health supports emergency management, because emergency management supports public health emergency preparedness. It really set the foundation for our working relationship.

Amy: After learning about what he does and what he needs, I came back to him at our next meeting and said, “I want to meet with you monthly. I have this grant [the Minnesota Response Sustainability Grant, to build local capacity in public health emergency preparedness]. Where do you see our biggest need for using this funding? If you could only pick one thing, what would it be?” 

And he said, “We need to do shelter training.”

Chris: Amy asked what I felt her priorities needed to be for her emergency preparedness. I said, “Honestly, Amy, the thing that keeps me up isn't necessarily the wind. It's not the fires. It's the people. It's: What do we do when we have to take care of our people?”

In April 2025, Amy and Chris enlisted the Red Cross to lead a shelter training for staff and community members from Beltrami County and 13 surrounding counties, at the Sanford Center in downtown Bemidji. Attendees from government, healthcare, human services, and community organizations learned how to stand up an emergency shelter, and then alternated between running the practice shelter and role-playing as shelter guests. 

Staff from Beltrami County and the Red Cross greet attendees at an emergency preparedness shelter training in April 2025. Credit: Amy Bowles.

Amy: We had [people from] long-term care, hospitals… And we recognized that it wasn't going to just take public health staff to respond to an emergency, but we needed finance, we needed the emergency manager, we needed a public information officer, we needed the Red Cross.

Staff from Bemidji-area cities, counties, and organizations convene in April 2025 for classroom training on running an emergency shelter, before breaking into small groups to learn hands-on shelter skills. Credit: Amy Bowles.

Chris: We had a huge contingent of Beltrami County staff that were able to attend. We also had a broader vision: If we have something [an emergency] of this magnitude, it's not going to be isolated to Beltrami County. So Amy extended the invitation to her public health partners across the region, and I did on the emergency management side, and in April, when we were finalizing the workshop and the exercise, we had over 100 participants. The strength in numbers was nice to see. 

We've done shelter fundamentals training with the Red Cross before, but we’ve never had the level of participation and engagement [as we did at the April training]. That was largely driven by Amy getting people involved and having it at a facility that was exciting to be at, the Sanford Center. 

Bemidji police officer Zach Rupert interviews Beltrami County Health and Human Services staff who are role playing as emergency shelter guests, as part of a shelter training in April 2025. Credit: Amy Bowles.

Chris: When we're doing these exercises, one thing that we always talk about is let's hope we never have to do this in real life.

And unfortunately, we did.

Act III: The response 

“The Sanford Center’s open” 

Saturday, June 21, 2025, early morning

When Amy arrived in downtown Bemidji, she and Chris made their way to the Bemidji fire station where first responders were starting to meet and organize.  

First responders gather at the Bemidji fire station at about 6:15 a.m. on June 21, to start planning the initial response to the derecho that had swept through town six hours earlier. Credit: Amy Bowles.

Amy: I remember just waiting for instructions. That's what we’re here to do: Who’s taking lead, who's giving instructions, and, you know, what are our next steps? I knew I had to make sure that I did not leave without knowing that someone was going to the Sanford Center to let me in.

You know, it was, it was pretty calm. 

From the fire station, Amy traveled a short distance to the Sanford Center, which would host the emergency shelter for people displaced by the derecho. Less than 12 hours after the derecho hit, county staff started to stand up a shelter—on the exact same site where they had practiced two months earlier.

Amy: I met Bobby Anderson; he’s the general manager [of the Sanford Center]. What a fantastic guy.

We were at the Sanford Center by, like, 7:00 a.m. I called Chris around 8:00 or 8:30 and said, “You can do your press release; the Sanford Center's open.” Because there were people that had been sleeping in the entryway of the sheriff's department and in the fire department downtown because of the storm damage.

The Sanford Center was also heavily damaged during the derecho, lacked power, and was running on a generator. 

Amy and her team began to set up in the part of the center that had sustained less damage.

Amy: They [the Sanford Center] were running on a generator, and we didn't realize the generator didn't work the toilets. So we didn't have bathrooms. And the only water that we had was from the battery-operated sinks. 

You know, it was just a wild ride.

“I need 100 sandwiches by noon”

Saturday, June 21, 2025, mid-morning

Amy quickly realized, however, that the biggest challenge wasn’t going to be the toilets; it was safely preparing and storing food for shelter guests.

Amy: The generator that was giving us a little bit of power would allow for us to PRESERVE the food in the freezer and the fridge, but not to OPEN them. If we’d opened them, we would have had to toss everything out if the power hadn’t come on within 24 hours. And we could not use the stove and the microwaves and the dishwashers and all that kind of stuff. 

Amy started hustling, calling her colleagues and asking for help feeding shelter guests and staff.

On site at the Sanford Center, Beltrami Public Health Director Amy Bowles shared information about safe food storage for during an outage, how to donate food to the emergency shelter, and how to come to the shelter as a resident. Credit: Lakeland PBS. 

Complicating the search for food: Bemidji is a commercial hub for the cities that surround it, which made it challenging to find enough food in the area to feed everyone who had lost their food when they’d lost power. 

Chris: What people don't realize about Bemidji: Everybody comes to Bemidji, from 60 miles in every direction. The next Walmart is over an hour away; we have all the big grocery stores. Everybody comes to Bemidji for what they need. What happens when you take that away? We don't have supplies [for the region], and if we run to the next little town next to us is they don't support 30,000 or 40,000 people like Bemidji does on any given day. Our first tier, second tier cities around us, were running out of basic supplies like food.

One of the first reinforcements to arrive was Sue Grafstrom, co-director of Roseau County Emergency Management and an emergency preparedness consultant with the Minnesota Department of Health. Grafstrom was driving through Bemidji to her home in Roseau and caught a radio bulletin about the derecho. 

Sue Grafstrom, co-director of Roseau County Emergency Management and retired emergency preparedness consultant with the Minnesota Department of Health. Credit: Submitted.

Sue Grafstrom (co-director of Roseau County Emergency Management and an emergency preparedness consultant with the Minnesota Department of Health): The morning after the derecho, I happened to be coming back [from out of town]. I heard someone on the radio say, “If you have any damage, let us know. We have power out all over the cities.” 

I called Amy Bowles, and I said, “Hey, Amy, I'm coming through. Do you need me to stay? Do you need anything from me?” She’s like, “I need 100 sandwiches by noon.” And this was about 10:30 in the morning. And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, okay, well, let me see what I can do.”

It was just the luck of the draw that I happened to be there [in the Bemidji area] at that point in time.

Rules around government purchasing in public health meant that Grafstrom couldn’t simply stop to buy sandwiches and be reimbursed later. Public health programs in the United States largely rely on categorical grant funds that support very specific work and won’t pay for any expenses incurred outside the grant’s scope. Some government agencies and programs have more flexibility: Grafstrom’s companion role with Roseau County in emergency management allowed for more flexibility in spending—in this case, on sandwiches. 

Sue: I recognized right away: I'm either paying for these [sandwiches] myself, or I'm going to run it through my budget with the county [Roseau County]. 

Luckily, I knew I was covered to some extent by my role [as a county emergency manager], because we have mutual aid agreements as emergency managers with all the other emergency managers. 

In the Beltrami County Emergency Operations Center, staff from the Beltrami County Emergency Management and Public Health departments, the Bemidji Police and Fire departments, and the Red Cross gather after a June 26 morning briefing. Credit: Beltrami County Emergency Management.

Chris: So that's one thing that we had Sue do was stop in Fosston [about 45 miles away] and get us food, because we didn't have anything in the Emergency Operations Center.

But food safety standards still matter, even during an emergency. The last thing an emergency needs is for all of the Emergency Operations Center staff to go down at the same time because of something they all ate.

Sue: I'm picking up everything I can think of, water and snacks and fruit and anything that could last longer than a sandwich on a hot afternoon. It took me most of the afternoon to find a resource close enough that could make 100 sandwiches, individually wrapped. But we did get them individually wrapped, and then I got them over back to Bemidji, but I don't think they got there before 4:00 p.m. And I started working on that at 11:00 a.m. 

Meanwhile, Amy and her growing team at the Sanford Center started grilling and assembling their own sandwiches.

Amy: Bobby Anderson [the Sanford Center manager], he went home and got his grill, and he and his staff grilled hamburgers. Then we made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for people who couldn't have hamburgers. 

We also delivered meals to the Emergency Operations Center, and if there was any food left that we weren't serving in-house, we were trying to make sure that the firefighters and the individuals who were out working in the field somehow got fed. 

Without computers, Beltrami Public Health staff tallied 265 meals that they’d served out of the Sanford Center by the end of the day on June 21. Credit: Amy Bowles.

“My feet hurt, and I felt guilty” 

Saturday, June 21, 2025, late evening

As the evening approached, Amy and the team at the Sanford Center estimated they’d served 265 meals on Friday. 

By 10:00 p.m. that evening, Amy had been working for 16 hours and sought a few minutes’ peace in the bathroom—a peaceful place to sit, since the bathroom’s toilets still weren’t working.

Amy: Yeah, my feet hurt! I was hoping I didn't smell. It was Saturday night, so I’d showered last that Friday morning. I’d brushed my teeth last that Friday morning. I was going on four hours of sleep, not a shower for over 24 hours, [hadn’t] brushed my teeth for 24 hours.

I just... I felt so guilty [for taking a break]. Like, the bathroom didn't work. You couldn't do anything in it! But: I. Just. Needed. Five. Minutes. I remember that's what was going through my mind: My feet hurt, and I felt guilty that I was sitting in the bathroom. 

My husband had asked me how it was going and if I was coming home, and I think I responded with, “Nope, not tonight!” 

Many first responders feel similar guilt as they move through an emergency, and struggle to reconcile caring for themselves with the urgent needs of others. 

Chris: You need to take into account before it [an emergency] happens that you are the potential victim as well. We had so many of our first responders, so many of our secondary responders that were victims in this storm, myself included. 

I consider myself to be an introvert that lives as an extrovert, so I always have the mentality of, “I can handle this, I can do this. I don't need any help.” And it became clear by, you know, about the 37th hour [of the response]: You need help. It took a little bit of time for somebody to point that out, and it was very humbling, but I was just like… “You're right.” So that's when I said “I need mutual aid to come in and so that I can get out of here for a little bit.” 

Sue: You know, I don't think a lot of times we give ourselves enough grace to recognize how triggering or how traumatic this is.

Johanna Christensen, Northwest Public Health System Consultant with the Minnesota Department of Health, lives about an hour and a half outside Bemidji and well out of the path of the derecho. She echoes the struggle of balancing work and home during an emergency. 

Johanna Christensen, Northwest Public Health System Consultant with the Minnesota Department of Health. Credit: Submitted.

Johanna Christensen (Northwest Public Health System Consultant, Minnesota Department of Health): In emergency management or emergency preparedness, you have to think about your staff that are affected, but also how you have to take care of stuff at home before you can take care of everybody else. 

I don't think I've ever been actually scared in a thunderstorm or severe weather. It was eerie.

First responders’ exhaustion is often magnified by staffing shortages that are a direct result of the same emergency. While a full complement of emergency responders is ideal, it’s often impossible due to responders’ need to care for their own homes and families, or sometimes just due to bad luck.

Chris: People that are typically almost always available may not be [during an emergency]. So, you need to make sure that you have secondary and tertiary people that can jump into roles. 

Amy: At that time, I think I had two vacant positions. My manager position was vacant—so, my person who would have been my, you know, “I'll do 12 hours; you do 12 hours”—that person didn't exist.

Adding to the shortage, another public health staffer was brand new and had just started the week prior, three of Amy’s staff were on vacation out of town, and two more were driving in from an hour outside Bemidji. 

Sue: What a lot of people don't realize is that: When you have a disaster, 30% of whoever's trained and supposed to be helping you out is not going to be able to make it to you. People forget about that. 

They’re running very lean on staffing in both public health and human services [in Beltrami County]. So if you've only got 12 people in your department and a third of them aren't even going to be available, well, now you're down to quite a lot less than you maybe planned on.
Amy: That first 24 hours, I ran the shelter with eight people. 

“Hey, kid. What do you need?” 

The first night of the shelter, the Beltrami County team housed 100 people at the Sanford Center. 

The next morning, Amy was still on duty at the Sanford Center. Her team kept hustling to find enough food for shelter residents and staff. 

More of the region’s emergency preparedness professionals descended on the Sanford Center. One of them was Jay Ward, Regional Healthcare Preparedness Coordinator with the Northwest Health Services Coalition.

Amy: I knew [Jay] from my days of working at the hospital. He showed up on Sunday, and I almost started crying. I had run into a hiccup where someone else had [mistakenly] taken all of the food that had been donated that I was planning on using for walk-ins that night, and distributed it to communities outside of Bemidji.

And I just… I wanted to be a giver. I want everyone to be taken care of. But the particular stuff that we had donated and used was because we were telling people, “Come to our center so you can get a meal.” 

I had to use our breakfast foods [for other meals], which were, you know, non-perishable granola bars-kind of stuff, applesauce, things that people had dropped off and donated. I had to use all that and I had no idea what I was going to do for [the next day’s] breakfast. 

Chris: It took a solid 24 to 36 hours for food drops to start coming into Bemidji. 

Amy: And Jay just shows up and he's like, “Hey, kid. What do you need?” I said, “Can you help me? Can you help me make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?” Because that's all I had left to offer. So we did that together. 

Chris: Fortunately, working through the shelter, we were able to get the Red Cross and the Salvation Army to supply some of those resources as well.

36 hours into the response, Amy went home for the first time for a 12-hour break. On Saturday night, the Beltrami County team sheltered another 74 people at the Sanford Center, far outstripping the 5-10 people the team had estimated, back in April, that they’d see during a real emergency.

“If somebody needed help, we helped them”

Monday-Thursday, June 23-26, 2025

By Monday, June 23, local utilities had restored enough power to area residents that Amy and her team decided to transition the Sanford Center shelter from overnight operations to just daytime hours.

As the shelter closed on Monday evening, Amy and her team made room for Sanford Center staff to start their own cleanup, shifting pallets and supplies out of the functioning parts of the building. The Sanford Center had sustained millions of dollars of roof and building damage.

Amy: My team worked all day and then came to the Sanford Center AFTER they got off of work, and helped take down everything from one side of the center and set it up on the other side so we could operate the resource center.

It was really important to us that we could make this transition because there were a bride and groom that were planning their wedding. This [the derecho] happened on Saturday. The following Friday night, they needed to be able to set up for their wedding, and we wanted to give that to them. 

I mean, we couldn't close down the shelter. We couldn't. They understood that. But if we could relocate the resource center, we were going to try to do so because what an amazing gift that we could give to that bride and groom—that even though life is disrupted, their wedding was going to go on.

Beltrami County staff shift emergency supplies around the Sanford Center on Monday, June 23 to make way for damage repair… and a wedding. Credit: Amy Bowles.

There’s a term for the team’s desire to go above and beyond for their neighbors—Social Scientist Jamil Zaki of Stanford University calls it “catastrophe compassion.” These widespread and consistent groundswells of mutual aid, acts altruism, and a heightened sense of solidarity were evident in Bemidji after the derecho. 

Amy: I've really enjoyed the community partnerships, and I very specifically use the word partnerships. To me, there's a difference between collaboration and partnership, right? When I collaborate with someone, we bounce ideas off each other, and then we go about do our own thing. We collaborated on those ideas. But a partnership is working together, supporting one another, and sharing resources.

After closing the overnight shelter, Amy and the Beltrami County team continued to gather food, water, and supplies at the Sanford Center and distribute them during the day to anyone who needed it.  

Amy: After we’d closed everything up, I had to manually tally everything—because we didn't have computers and everything was being done on paper—so I'm shuffling through all these papers trying to figure out how to gather the data and make useful data. I can tell you we served 5,000 people over the course of three days, that came in and had a meal, had a warm place to stay, used a bathroom when our bathrooms were finally operational, or came in and got water and food and cleaning supplies.

After closing the overnight shelter, Beltrami County staff set up a tent outside the county office with donations from local stores—gallons of water, fresh fruit, non-perishable food, and hygiene supplies. Credit: Amy Bowles.

Volunteers move supplies donated from local stores to a tent outside the Beltrami County office. Credit: Amy Bowles.

Amy: The thing is… it wasn't anything special. It wasn't like we were giving people, you know, a four-course meal or anything like that. But we had something to offer people to just maybe give them a little bit of hope or a little bit of comfort, or just to say we see you or to connect with them and get them connected to the resources they really did need.

Chris: If somebody needed help, we helped them.

Act IV: After the storm

“The blessing of the storm”

July 2025 to today

In the weeks following the derecho, Amy and Chris reflected on the derecho, its aftermath, and their role in the response. Amy calls this the “blessing of the storm,” the connectivity she sees across Bemidji and Beltrami County and the momentum toward making sure the city and county are ready for the next emergency.

Sue: You know, I don't know that [the derecho response and shelter] could have gone much better as far as her and Beltrami Public Health being able to respond to [the derecho].

Chris: This is bigger than one department. It is bigger than one silo, and this would be an entire county's response. I think that that was a seed [during the April training]. It was a small plant at first that grew exponentially once the June 21st derecho hit. The efforts of that training and the planning in April set us up for success when we actually had to do it in a real-life environment in June. 

Before the derecho, Beltrami’s emergency response was largely limited to public health and emergency management staff. Since then, the entire county Health and Human Services Department has become involved. To Amy, this county-wide approach is a big win for county residents.

Amy: That storm totally changed how Beltrami County approaches emergency response. We’re forming Beltrami County Health and Human Services’ first ever Emergency Response Committee. We’re working on a binder with our response plan to sheltering, a family assistance center, a reunification center, and a call-down procedure for all of Health and Human Services. 

Our staff, the committee that's working on the sheltering portion—when we were talking about the call down drill, they asked, “Can we be at the TOP of the call down drill? Because we're part of this, we want to be the first to be called to respond.” 

I'm like, “Well, we can't, you know, hijack a process just to call certain people first. We have to do it strategically, but I promise you you'll get the phone call and if you're available…”

[They responded with] “Well, when we open a shelter, can we have a LEAD role?” and I’m like, “Yes, I would be more than happy to give you a lead role.”

“We do these things so we’re prepared”

July 2025 to today

For Chris, a 20-year veteran of emergency management work, the success of an emergency response depends on whether a county can dedicate resources and staffing to learning from the last emergency and preparing for the next one.

Chris: We're a year out from being impacted by this derecho, and we're still learning and looking at best practices through our After Action [Report], and at some of the consequences of not having everything in place [when the derecho hit]. Implementing those—nobody can do it overnight. Nobody can do it in a month. We're still integrating those into our daily plans.

The Minnesota Response Sustainability Grant is one way local and Tribal public health departments can help pay for the infrastructure needed to mount a solid emergency response—the training, planning, and equipment. 

The Response Sustainability Grant supported Beltrami County Public Health’s April 2025 shelter training which, in turn, gave county staff beyond public health the knowledge and experience they needed to host an emergency shelter after the June 2025 derecho.

Chris: The funding that we subsequently got is [due to the] generosity of Amy, taking a holistic look at what is needed to support not only her [Beltrami County Public Health] but our community. We invested in technology in our emergency operations center that we wouldn't have been able to afford, to upgrade. We used it every single day in response to it [the derecho]. Our health and human services dialed in, our public health department dialed in, our shelter managers, our Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster—they all dialed in. We wouldn't have had as smooth of an operation if we hadn’t invested in that equipment.

Amy: We don't just do [grant activities] to get money. We do these things so we're prepared. 

In November 2025, the Local Public Health Association of Minnesota presented Amy with its Emerging Leader Award. “Her calm direction and commitment ensured that there was a plan for response and strong community relationships in place,” said Beltrami County Health and Human Services Director Anne Lindseth. “Under her direction, residents of her community had access to a safe place, shelter and food. She ensured that essential public health services were maintained when they were needed most.”

Sue: I really do credit Amy for just being able to handle that response [to the derecho] better than anyone ever imagined it could be done. And the fact that she and Chris are such good coworkers and partners? It's not like that [elsewhere].

Johanna: I think what shone through were the community relationships and partnerships that Amy has built. Just knowing that there are people to reach out to and thinking big picture about the situation. It’s a real testament to Amy's work in the community, building some of those bridges.

Chris: Having somebody like Amy that acknowledges and moves forward knowing that they're going to have some responsibility and skin in the game, I think, was a huge relief for me—that I don't have to convince someone that they have to do this

Johanna: And it takes ongoing work and nurturing. They are truly relationships that you have to keep up and they don't just happen. I think Amy's relationship with Chris really highlights the importance of having a strong relationship [in public health] with your emergency manager.

Amy: I have such a fantastic team—like, you can have a great idea, but if you don't have great people to help you execute those ideas, they're just ideas.

Chris: It’s all of our responsibility to care for our community.

Beltrami County Public Health Director Amy Bowles keeps a photo on her desk, from a colleague in the derecho response. Next to the photo, her colleague wrote: “She’s a little wildflower, with a lot of warrior underneath.” Credit: Amy Bowles.