Secrets of the City

From the Strib: On Tuesday, Gov. Tim Pawlenty asked federal officials to declare an agricultural disaster in Kittson, Lake of the Woods, Marshall, Pennington, Roseau and Koochiching counties.

Farmers in those counties “have experienced significant losses due to excessively wet conditions in 2008 and 2009,” Pawlenty wrote in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

MNIndependent says: If states’ rights include opting out of a public option in federal health care reform, they apparently don’t include the right to deal with droughts and deluges on your own.

Stuff About MPLS republishes footage taken outside Electric Fetus showing people in the neary bus stop when Wedesday’s tornado hit, causing the glass in the shelter to explode.

Rumor has a tornado hit S Mpls and downtown. Anyone see it? (Strib Story.)

Stuff About Mpls publishes an awesome ode to WCCO weatherman Bud Kraehling: All I heard last night, and for most of the past week, was Thunderstorms are A-Comin! Nothing has happened. I’m not some big thunderstorm advocate, but you guys today (I’m talking to you Sven, and that skinny guy at Fox 9) seem to be wrong all the time now. If this continues, I swear to God I will use it in my power with this tumblr to pull Bud Kraehling out of retirement.

No, it’s not that he noticed I called him a weather terrorist; it’s that MinnPost has the former WCCO weatherman.

Bob Collins has been reporting from Fargo-Moorhead, where the flooding is disasterous; the families he has been following have been ordered out — mandatory evacuation for the entire neighborhood. MnStories has a fair amount of footage, including this heartbreaking on-the-scene report.

Bob Collins writes about the espected flooding in the Fargo-Moorehead region, and how social media has been used to organize volunteer flood fighters. A quote from the story: “I got an e-mail last Thursday with a call for volunteers. It just kind of hit me that we can really get the word out quickly… to a lot of people in real time using a social network like Facebook. We also have a Twitter account set up. People have this up and running at work, at home, going to their cellphones. E-mail seemed a lot slower, which is funny since it’s always been known as a fast method to communicate.”

Usually there’s no real need to post on the weather in Minnesota during the winter. It snows. So what. But, man, it is a solid white wall of death out there, and Twitter users have already dubbed it snowmaggedon. What is this going to do to your day?

The Star-Tribune is now partnering with WCCO to cover the weather. What does this mean? That Paul Douglas, who was providing weather content for the Strib, has once again lost a job thanks to WCCO.

Secrets of the City’s own Dude Weather gets its own parody, in the form of a 10-year-old boy.