I’ve written about the Children’s Blizzard today, but decided to put it into Reprint because of the focus on history.
I’m very glad that the blizzard we had over the weekend did not kill 250-500 people.
Historical Snowstorms and Blizzards
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Tag Archives: North Dakota
Ah, Nature. Ah-choo!
If you’re seeing a lot of people wandering around with puffy eyes and runny noses, it’s because the pollen count is ridiculously high again, apparently across the entirety of North Dakota and a few other really unfortunate states.
I’ve had some success with loratadine and cetirizine, in that at least my eyes aren’t itchy anymore, but… well, I’m kinda looking forward to winter, now, because the pollen count doesn’t look like it’s going to let up any time in the immediate future.
A Bit More on Pertussis
My story on pertussis this week didn’t focus too much on the cause of the recent uptick in whooping cough cases we’re seeing nationwide. Is it unvaccinated children? is it unvaccinated adults? something else?
Anne Polta did a wonderful examination of the question on her HealthBeat blog, and I recommend taking a look at it.
I do have to wonder if Minnesota’s recent uptick has anything to do with Andrew Wakefield’s visit. For the record, Wakefield’s “study” claiming autism is caused by vaccines was fraudulent and he deliberately falsified data for it. He is no longer permitted to practice medicine in the U.K. and his fraudulent “work” has been discredited in countless scientific fora.
North Dakota’s already seen more cases this year than it saw all year last year, but the really alarming numbers are coming out of Minnesota, where there have been 1,881 cases this year thus far.
I gathered the numbers for Minnesota’s pertussis cases for the last decade-and-change, all of which are available on the state’s Dept. of Health website. Here they are.
2012 1881 to date
2011 661
2010 1143
2009 1134
2008 1034
2007 393
2006 320
2005 1571
2004 1368
2003 207
2002 429
2001 308
2000 575
As you can see, and as I noted in my article, numbers for pertussis fluctuate quite a bit and there are plenty of ups and downs.
Yet this year isn’t just another “up.” The number of cases Minnesota has had in seven months has significantly outstripped the numbers from every other year since 2000. That’s the most recent year I had easy access to numbers for, too, so it might even go back further. I have no idea. However, this is definitely a matter for concern.
Part of the problem is that people are not vaccinating their children. Part of the problem is that adults are not getting vaccinated themselves.
I will (mostly) spare you the lecture on herd immunity and explanations of why it is critical that ordinary healthy adults stay updated on their vaccines, but I would like to note that whooping cough can be especially devastating to babies. Most people want to keep babies safe.
Health officials recommend that adults get a Tdap vaccination. People are supposed to get a Td booster every 10 years anyway, and Tdap takes the place of that, so you won’t even need any extra shots.
It’s virtually painless (the needle is ultra-tiny), most insurance companies pay for it and it’ll probably take less than half an hour. You don’t even need an appointment for it at some clinics.
And frankly, you don’t want to get whooping cough anyway. It sounds a lot like having the worst cold imaginable, and you can have it for more than six weeks. Having a minor cold for six days is bad enough for me, thanks.
There are Donut Cops?
There are donut cops. This is a thing which actually exists. Had I realized this earlier on in my life, I may have chosen a different career track, although I’m not sure my blood pressure would’ve thanked me for it.
I have a wide assortment of other links that may or may not be of interest:
- Logan Adams, of “It’s Good to Be in N.D.” has posted after a long hiatus. Hurray!
- Dull and Boring are together at last, as sister communities. I’ve always thought it would be awkward to live in a town with a weird name, although being able to say “I’ll see you in Hell!” in a chipper, friendly voice would be kind of funny.
- “The Hunger Games,” which is a great book, and its sequels feature four of the top five highlighted passages in books on Kindle, as well as eight of the top ten. The other two in the top ten are from Jane Austen. All ten of them were written, in other words, by women.
- A mom-science-blogger calls TLC out on some vaccine-related silliness. TLC asked “why shouldn’t we vaccinate our children” as if doing so were a bad thing. Vaccinating is not a bad thing, there is no link between vaccines and autism and the paper that claimed there was was not only false, but deliberately fraudulent.
- How do you feel about nounjectives, adjectives that become nouns? The good, the bad, the ugly and the like? Apparently some people have very strong negative feelings about them. I quite enjoy using the term “awesome” as a noun, personally.
- Men can have sympathetic pregnancies. It’s called “couvade syndrome,” and it sounds pretty uncomfortable, although not as uncomfortable as actually having all your internal organs jammed up into your chest cavity to make room for a bonus human.
Election Day!
It’s primary election day in North Dakota, and for a newsroom that means an evening of fun, togetherness and a bit of last-minute stress as the deadline approaches.
The polls close at 7 p.m. tonight, with vote totals expected at 8:30 or 9 p.m. But the whole paper has to be done and out the door by 11. That gives us very little time to write, proof, place and send everything.
It can be stressful, but I like it, too — the camaraderie is great and this being the Midwest, there’s always food around.
I just made half a pot of coffee.
Huzzah for elections!
I Live in Absolute Terror
My neighbors have been hearing all sorts of screaming, screeching, yelping and thudding around my apartment lately, as I have attempted to stem the tide of the moth invasion with spray poison and phone books.
I am afraid of moths.
Given that fact, I apparently chose the wrong year to move to North Dakota. Because of our wonderfully mild winter, the moths are coming out in droves, fuzzy-winged, fluttery and frightening.
They are also coming in in droves.
They can apparently get through my screen windows, so I have to close those. They can apparently survive being doused with enough poison to kill, for example, me. Or at least send me out of the room, coughing, wheezing, and brandishing the spray-bottle of Raid as if it were a club, or maybe my last hope of salvation from the evil moth menace.
The problem is, once you spray the darn things, their mothy navigational system goes haywire and their wings stop working right, so they dive-bomb the room, swerving around like a B-52 with a drunken pilot. Unfortunately, what this means to someone afraid of moths is: They fly directly at you slightly faster than the speed of light.
To my neighbors: Sorry about all the screaming. Once moth season is over, it’ll quiet down… at least until spider season starts.
Lawyers, but No Guns or Money
Jack McDonald, the counsel for the North Dakota Newspaper Association, provided everyone in the room with a packet, entitled All Things Legal, with the subtitle: A brief look at ND open meetings and open records laws & other sticky and damnable media legal issues.
McDonald’s session at the NDNA Annual Convention last week was extremely helpful, especially to someone who hasn’t been in North Dakota all that long.
As it turns out, it’s a lot harder to close a meeting in North Dakota than it is in Minnesota. In Minnesota, when you discuss personnel issues, you can generally close the meeting. So if you’re speaking about the performance of a county administrator, for example, you close the meeting first.
In North Dakota you can’t do that.
You can also bring cameras into the courtroom in North Dakota, and last I checked, Minnesota was examining doing that but hadn’t quite got there yet.
There are some restrictions, though–you can’t take pictures before the judge enters the courtroom, or after the judge leaves the courtroom. You can’t be disruptive–you can’t have a flash on, and you certainly can’t use a camera that makes a bunch of noise.
You also have to ask the judge in advance to allow you to bring a camera into the courtroom.
News from–and in–the Oil Patch
The oil boom is affecting newspapers in western North Dakota just as much as it is every other industry, it seems.
Three people in the newspaper business had a roundtable discussion Friday morning at the North Dakota Newspaper Association conference, which I attended, and all three of them and the moderator had a lot to say about how their businesses had been affected.
Forum Communications Company Reporter Amy Dalrymple, whose work we often run in the Jamestown Sun, covered the discussion. Her story’s great, check it out!
There are a couple of other things I’d like to add:
- At least one paper has so many ad purchases coming in that it’s having a hard time keeping the ad content down to 75% of its pages. If it doesn’t do that, it’ll lose its favorable mail rate, which is bad.
The obvious solution is to hire another reporter to write for them so they have more content to fill pages with. Unfortunately, hiring reporters to work in the Oil Patch, like hiring anyone else to work there, is hard.
They hire people, who then can’t find a place to live, and go work somewhere else. Or they hire someone, who decides they don’t like the job, and then just literally wanders off because they can get ten other jobs in ten minutes.
This means the newspapers sometimes hire people right off the street, because if they leave, they might not get another shot at that person.
That’s how scarce workers are. And of course they have to pay them more, too.
- Staff members are so short that when the three joked about poaching each other’s people, I had the uneasy feeling that there was a little bit of truth to the jokes. They needed people badly, in other words.
I was surprised no one tried to recruit me on the spot, or lure me into a parking garage to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse. But nobody did.
The Oil Patch: It’s Not What You Think
I visited North Dakota’s Oil Patch last week and discovered the truth about the area, often compared to the Wild West and considered frightening, dangerous and filled with men who would shoot you just to watch you die.
Unsurprisingly, after a visit to Williston and a general tour of the area, as well as a quick stop in Walmart there and a brief hour or so in a bar, I found it’s really not that bad.
Caveat: I have actually lived in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in Minneapolis, which is… well. As a Minnesotan all I can really say is “It’s not a nice neighborhood.” Partly because we’re Nice and partly because I can’t remember how long after I left that guy was shot to death a block from where I lived, or how bad the stabbing in the parking lot was. And yes, I did get held up at gunpoint there. So it’s not a very nice neighborhood.
Williston is going through massive changes. That much is stunningly obvious. There’s construction everywhere, there are man camps everywhere, at Walmart they can’t keep certain items on the shelves.
A few words about Walmart, as it’s been a locus of rumors. They stopped allowing people to park campers in its parking lot, and they staff a 24-hour security guard. My colleague Logan Adams and I visited it at about 9 p.m., and there were about 5 men to every 1 woman shopping. The women were generally not unaccompanied, but whether they were with men or in pairs with other women varied a bit. The lines were very long.
Many of the men there were blue collar guys, either oil field workers or construction guys, or maybe they worked in various other fields. Plenty of tattoos, plenty of people from various ethnicities.
Not one of them seemed the slightest bit interested in making trouble of any kind. They were just shopping. In fact, while we were waiting in line to buy something, one of them politely waved us forward to the checkout counter instead of jumping in front of us when we were slow.
Picture from Logan Adams: https://twitter.com/LoganCAdams
It was very obvious the Walmart in Williston is having trouble keeping certain things on shelves. There were quite a few things on pallets waiting to be shelved, and there were quite a few items that were completely gone. The shelf containing water, for example, was completely empty. Many campers don’t have running water, so people living in them have to buy it.
A lot of other shelves that were empty had contained what I called “dude food,” meaning food an 18-25-year-old guy would buy–ramen noodles, frozen dinners, meat, and frozen pizza. I haven’t ever seen such a large selection of frozen pizza in my life. It took up a little more than half of a very long freezer aisle. The meat section had been decimated, so maybe some of these guys have grills. That would be nice, I thought. Dudes like to grill. It’s a total stereotype, but there’s some truth in it too.
Movies were obviously popular, as a bargain bin of DVDs had been decimated and clearly certain flicks were selling well. You had to wonder about some of them. “The Fox and the Hound”–are these guys nostalgic for their youth? Maybe. I did notice that the stack of Twilight movies was completely untouched.
On a tour of the Williston area, we drove past numerous man camps, some of which looked sort of liveable, and others of which looked like people warehouses, drab, soulless and dormlike beyond belief. I don’t mean nice dorms. I mean icky dorms.
Houses are being built too. This isn’t an area of emphasis for most press coverage, because houses are being built everywhere, but it’s still pretty interesting from my perspective.
No care at all is being taken to stop or even limit erosion at any of these sites, or at least, none that I saw. There’s lots of exposed soil, all of which I’m sure ends up in the waterways every time it rains. I suppose high-turbidity water isn’t first on anyone’s list of concerns over there at this point.
The houses being built in nice suburb-type areas vary quite a bit, but they are being built very, very close together compared to suburbs in, say, Plymouth, Minn. Land values must be at an extreme premium even for people who can afford massive houses.
Not one person made me feel the least bit uncomfortable the entire time I was there. That’s not to say bad things don’t happen in the Oil Patch; I just don’t think it’s quite as bad as people make it out to be.
Sure, if you’re from a really rural area, like the Oil Patch used to be, and you are used to small-town life, it may be a shock to you to suddenly have to lock your door at night. It’s just not what you’re used to, and you may very well not like it. That’s entirely fair. Then again, these days, it’d be a good idea to take that precaution no matter where you live.
But from the perspective of this outsider, it’s really not that bad.
Westward! To the Oil Patch!
Tomorrow I’m heading out with a colleague to the modern-day Wild West, filled with oilmen, money and trucks so big they will make you say “That’s no moon!” and back away with horror.
I’m going to a newspaper conference, but along with some shiny continuing education-type stuff, there will also be a tour of the Oil Patch.
I’m greatly looking forward to getting out there, and I’m really glad I won’t have to drive. My car, though normal-sized, would turn into a bumper car out there in the Oil Patch at worst and a golf cart at best. My assistant editor has a TRUCK. So we’ll fit in with everybody else out there who isn’t driving a semi.
I’ll try to post a couple of times while I’m out there–just some observations on what it’s like, nothing too complex–and hopefully I won’t get smushed by a truck or anything like that.
