North Dakota
Fighting the Flames: North Dakota’s historic October wildfires, a mini-documentary
BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) – Historic wildfires severely impacted parts of North Dakota throughout October. Here is a look back at what caused them and the impact they had.
The majority of the fires broke out on Saturday, October 5, when a powerful cold front produced 60 to near 80 miles per hour wind gusts with very dry air.
The Bear Den Fire prompted an evacuation for a small portion of the Fort Berthold Reservation and came close to the community of Mandaree. The fire, which was fully contained on October 20, burned about 13,500 acres.
The Elkhorn Fire burned about 10,300 acres across rugged terrain south of Watford City and was contained after 11 days.
Williams County was the hardest hit, where two large fires each traveled approximately 20 miles, crossing Highway 2, and burning almost 90,000 acres, especially impacting the communities of Ray and Tioga.
Many other fires occurred across the state that first weekend of October, and as conditions remained dry, more popped up during the middle of the month. That included fires that burned more than a thousand acres north of Bismarck near Double Ditch and an approximately thousand-acre fire near Medora.
“The combination of a number of factors really led to the extreme severity of these wildfires back in October. A combination of long-term drought, and we had a high wind event on top of that, that not only was a high wind event, but we had gusts exceeding 70 miles per hour. And very low relative humidity combined with all of that, led to the extreme nature of this event,” said Chauncy Schultz, science and operations officer at the Bismarck National Weather Service. “So, we occasionally get high wind events in North Dakota, every year, right? But to actually get them in combination with drought-type conditions and with that really low relative humidity — the relative humidity back on that October day was actually down in the 20, 25-percent range. It’s rare to get relative humidity that low with winds that high in our part of the world just by the nature of how the weather patterns usually set up that drive those high wind events.”
“So, it’s really rare to actually get all of those conditions superimposed on top of each other, which is a good thing that it doesn’t happen very often, but obviously, extremely unfortunate when it does,” said Schultz.
“Fire season can be any time in North Dakota if these conditions align,” said Schultz. “We’ve had very large fires going back a few years in January, we’ve had fires in July and August that are really large as well. We’ve certainly had past falls where we’ve had fire seasons as well, and a lot of it has to do with if we have moisture in that August, September timeframe. If we have moisture there, a lot of times the fuels, the grasses will hold a little bit of that moisture until closer to when we actually get snowfall. This particular fall, of course, we didn’t have the moisture going in, and we had a protracted warm and dry fall — more opportunities to have these wind events on top of those dry, really drought-loaded types of fuels, which can lead to these sort of extreme conditions.”
These fires likely are the worst in North Dakota’s recorded history with more than 110,000 acres being impacted. The only event that comes close happened 25 years ago.
“The closest sort of analog that we would have is actually the Halloween 1999 wildfire outbreak, which had a lot of similarities to this one, including some really large fires in northeast Montana and western North Dakota that exceeded 20,000 acres and even greater than that,” said Schultz. “And that event also had high winds behind a cold front with relatively low relative humidity, and it also followed drought conditions — there were a lot of similarities. I think the difference maker between that event and this one that made this one even worse was that the winds were even a little bit higher. So, back in Halloween ‘99, the wind gusts were in that 60-65 mile per hour range. And with this event, the wind gusts exceeded 70 miles per hour and they stayed that high for a prolonged period of time.”
“Looking back at some of the data, we can see that the Williston area, for example, really hadn’t seen a half inch or more of precipitation in about 100 days leading up to that event,” said Schultz. “If we go back and look at the Halloween 1999 wildfire outbreak, it was very similar. It was around 100 days preceding that event where there had not been a half inch or more of precipitation, really speaking to those drought conditions. But the numbers actually line up very similarly, and we got pretty similar results. This event back in October was the more extreme of the two, but within the general realm, we can look at those patterns and I think that will help us in the future better anticipate hopefully and predict these sorts of things. And then we hope that we can prepare for them on the ground.”
Firefighters, the North Dakota National Guard, and many others came together to battle the blazes. Along the way, remarkable footage of their efforts was captured.
“Recognizing not only the dryness that was going on, but the weather events that were coming in, and how we were, unfortunately, setting ourselves up for potential disaster, which is unfortunately, of course, what happened in this particular case,” said Schultz.
“Speaking from some experience from myself, even though I was not involved with these fires, but being a firefighter in my personal time as well, the extreme nature of this, being able to try to do anything to try to stop these fires is basically impossible,” said Schultz. “So, you’re always for the next road and you’re hoping and praying that the winds go down. And so, it’s the extreme nature of these fires that makes them a safety hazard for all the fire crews as well. And you do your best to try to stop them, but the flames are just moving so fast that you’re really, really focused on protecting structures, protecting lives as best you can until you can sort of catch the fire.”
“The topography certainly makes it a challenge for firefighting, and the firefighters, the professionals even, and all the volunteers, which we have many of across the state, deal with that problem when we get in this sort of terrain,” said Schultz. “We have that in the western part of the state where some of these fires were burning, and that really does make it difficult to get to the fire to get water on it. Ultimately, you need to get water on it or you need to build a fire break, and in a lot of these cases, they had to build fire lines or fire breaks to try to slow down the fires or stop them because of, in part, the terrain, and, of course, the wind on that October 5 day as well.”
“We were seeing 75-foot flame lengths with 60-mile-per-hour winds. Just too extreme to be close to the fire,” said Marle Baker, the fire management officer for the Three Affiliated Tribes and fire chief for Mandaree.
“That’s pretty hard to hear. You just start packing the things up. It was very emotional,” said Vawnita Best, who lives southeast of Watford City.
Remembering Johannes Nicolass Van Eden and Edgar Coppersmith who died during the fires
“My heart needed to do something more to help our community,” said Lyda Jade Spotted Bear, a Mandaree resident. “I’m proud to be from this community. And any little thing that happens, we do, we come together a lot.”
“Extremely humbling to see what this community is doing to help us,” said Baker.
“This is the best of America right here. This is where neighbors still help neighbors,” said North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum.
“I know people come together for stuff like this in times of need, but it is shocking to see everybody,” said Kelci Hanson, a Tioga resident who organized a benefit auction in support of families who were most impacted by the Williams County wildfires.
“Our fellow firefighters who dropped everything that they were doing on a Saturday to come to help us save our town,” said Ray Fire Chief Kyle Weyrauch.
“We will get these kinds of conditions again someday, hopefully not anytime soon, but odds are that sometime over the next 50 years, it’s going to happen where we’ll have these sort of weather conditions again,” said Schultz. “So, an awareness of how you can take protective actions to maybe protect your property, raise awareness for those sorts of things is important going forward. We look at the meteorology of these conditions, we collaborate with fire management officials, fire officials within the state, to try and detect things like this earlier so that we can have advanced warnings — Red Flag Warnings, and things like that — that maybe can help identify these. So, we can learn from the unfortunate set of events that happened from this one to hopefully better prepare and better predict for the next one.”
Copyright 2024 KFYR. All rights reserved.
GRAND FORKS — A North Dakota composer’s dream is turning into a statewide invitation.
Williston-based musician Emily Black-Driscoll was chosen as the North Dakota Music Teachers Association’s commissioned composer for 2026. She’s preparing an original composition that will premiere in August.
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North Dakota
Challengers declare victory after ND Supreme Court rules against Legislature’s attempt to alter term limits
BISMARCK — A constitutional ballot measure to amend the state’s term limits law as proposed by the Legislature will not appear on November’s ballot, the North Dakota Supreme Court ruled Thursday, siding with petitioners who argued the Legislature exceeded its authority and violated the state constitution in proposing the changes.
“The people’s voice was heard,” Grand Forks County Commissioner Terry Bjerke said in reaction to the news.
Bjerke was a member of the sponsoring committee behind the successful 2022 effort to pass a term limits initiative, which amended the state constitution by capping legislative term limits to eight years in the House and eight years in the Senate. The amendment, which became article XV of the state constitution, also included a clause barring the Legislature from making constitutional changes to term limits.
During the 2025 session, however, lawmakers narrowly approved Senate Concurrent Resolution 4008, in which the legislature proposed Constitutional Measure 1, a ballot measure to amend the term limits language to allow legislators to decide in which chamber they want to serve their 16 years, and to repeal the clause limiting the legislative assembly’s authority to propose an amendment to alter or repeal term limits.
Bjerke and former Minot legislator Oley Larsen brought the lawsuit challenging the validity of the Legislature’s action in January, and the state Supreme Court
heard oral arguments in the case
this spring.
“Those term limits may only be altered by a measure proposed by the people rather than the Legislative Assembly. And yet a few years later, the Legislative Assembly is doing what they are prohibited from doing,” attorney Zachary Wallen argued on Bjerke and Larsen’s behalf.
Tanner Ecker / The Bismarck Tribune
The Legislature’s attorneys argued the clause prohibiting legislative proposals to alter the constitutional term limits language “infringes on our republican form of government” by “limiting the people’s ability to vote on amendments proposed by their elected officials.”
Justice Jon Jensen seemed skeptical of that argument during the April 2 hearing, questioning whether a second vote was appropriate.
“The public did speak on this. The public spoke on it when it passed the original constitutional amendment and they said, ‘Legislature, you don’t even get to propose a change.’ They have already spoken on it,” Jensen said. “You want a second shot, or a second bite at the apple, not a first one, a second.”
In Thursday’s ruling, all five justices sided with Bjerke and Larsen.
“We … conclude the Legislative Assembly’s adoption of S.C.R. 4008 violated N.D. Const. art. XV … and declare S.C.R. 4008 and Constitutional Measure 1 void … We enjoin the Secretary of State from placing Constitutional Measure 1 on the November 2026 general election ballot,” the ruling said.
Bjerke thanked the legal team that worked on behalf of their lawsuit, and said he was grateful the court reached the conclusion it did.
“I’m thrilled that what the people voted on and approved has been validated,” Bjerke said.
He added that the Legislature had “multiple opportunities” to address term limits prior to 2022’s initiated measure and chose not to, and gave a nod to the country’s coming milestone and the process by which voters expressed their support for term limits.
“We’ve lasted 250 years,” Bjerke said. “I have two words for those elected leaders who think they aren’t: everyone’s replaceable.”
North Dakota
Fargo woman convicted in North Dakota fraud case now faces charges in Minnesota: A deeper dive
FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) – A North Dakota woman who was sentenced to 180 days in jail in Cass County for defrauding healthcare providers and Medicaid programs is now facing additional fraud charges in Minnesota.
Christine Marie Pryor, 55, pleaded guilty in November 2024 to theft by deception involving more than $50,000. She was sentenced to first serve 180 days with a 3-year sentence suspended. She received credit for 44 days already served.
Pryor was ordered to pay $82,584.78 in restitution to Southeast Human Services in Fargo, where she worked between 2018 and 2019.
How the scheme unfolded
According to court documents, Pryor worked at multiple healthcare facilities in North Dakota and Minnesota between 2018 and 2023, using the identities and credentials of three licensed professionals without their knowledge. She submitted fraudulent Capella University diplomas and transcripts to gain employment.
Investigators say Pryor admitted she searched state licensing websites for therapists who shared her first name, then used those therapists’ last names and license numbers when applying for jobs.
At Southeast Human Services, where she worked as a Licensed Addiction Counselor, Pryor earned $55,584.82 while providing therapy services to approximately 150 patients. She also opened her own counseling center, NIAM Brain Injury Center, in Fargo between 2020 and 2021, and worked at The Lotus Center in Moorhead, Minnesota, from 2021 to 2023.
Court documents say the three licensed professionals whose identities were used told investigators they had no knowledge of Pryor’s actions and did not give her permission to use their information.
Two additional charges against Pryor in North Dakota, unauthorized use of personal identifying information, were dismissed on motion of the state.
Additional charges in Minnesota
Pryor is also facing charges in Minnesota. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced on Tuesday charges against Pryor in Clay County District Court for six theft offenses and six identity theft offenses related to defrauding Minnesota’s Medicaid program of more than $150,000.
According to the Minnesota complaint, Pryor claimed to provide psychotherapy and alcohol and drug counseling services to Medicaid recipients despite having no license or credentials to do so. Prosecutors allege she used the credentials and identities of three licensed professionals while claiming to provide Medicaid-funded services to 169 clients.
The Minnesota charges were filed as part of National Health Care Fraud Takedown Day, a joint effort involving the Department of Justice and more than 40 state Medicaid Fraud Control Units.
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