It takes all of us. This theme echoes through this issue of North Dakota Living, with accounts of people coming together and stepping up for the betterment of our greater community. It’s a reoccurring virtue of rural people and rural places.
In this issue, you’ll meet teenagers who are balancing school commitments while volunteering as rural emergency responders. You’ll learn how our state helps its seniors. And you’ll meet a family who is giving back to their community, which supported them during one of life’s greatest challenges.
Another example is told often throughout the pages of North Dakota Living and throughout the history of North Dakota’s electric cooperatives. Co-ops proudly tell, and retell, the stories after the storm – how we got the lights back on and how everyone pitched in to make it happen, from other cooperatives providing mutual aid to co-op members making meals and snowplow drivers clearing the way.
Although a storm and its resulting power outages may only last a few hours or days, it could take an electric cooperative system weeks, months or even years to fully recover.
Consider this summer’s tornadoes, derecho winds and hail – reminders of our infrastructure’s vulnerability to weather. On June 21, Gov. Kelly Armstrong declared a statewide disaster. North Dakota’s electric cooperatives worked with partners at the N.D. Department of Emergency Services to compile information to support the governor’s request for a presidential disaster declaration, which is necessary to activate Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster funding.
This funding is critical for electric co-op members in North Dakota, who would otherwise have to pay to rebuild electric cooperative systems after storms through higher electric rates. Because electric cooperatives serve sparsely populated rural areas in the state and maintain nearly 67,000 miles of power lines, one bad storm could mean one grim future for an electric cooperative.
In the case of natural disasters, it takes all of us – FEMA included.
FEMA’s future has been debated in recent months, and electric cooperatives are urging a “fix, don’t nix” approach. Thankfully, a comprehensive, bipartisan proposal to reform and modernize FEMA has been introduced in Congress.
You can read more about the Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act of 2025 on page 4, which would improve and preserve FEMA and its critical role in disaster response and recovery.
What can you do? Encourage leaders to support this critical reform. Join the grassroots network of more than 1 million advocates who help shape energy policy that keeps the lights on by registering to be a voice for cooperative power at voicesforcooperativepower.com.
Remember, it takes all of us.
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Josh Kramer, editor-in-chief of North Dakota Living, is executive vice president and general manager of NDAREC. Contact him at jkramer@ndarec.com.
