South Dakota
Canton, South Dakota residents call for accountability in aftermath of ‘thousand-year flood’
South Dakota residents have been rebuilding this summer after flash floods in June damaged homes, destroyed valuables and displaced families across the tri-state area.
Canton was one of the areas hit hardest in South Dakota, with some areas in the city receiving more than 18 inches of rain between June 20 and 22, almost exactly a decade after a similar flood washed over the community in 2014. Government officials called this a thousand-year flood, and the small community of roughly 3,000 fell within the less than .1% chance of such a rainfall event happening in any given year, according to the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls.
Yet, without municipal support, the Canton community rallied to stack sandbags against homes and dispose of ruined furniture in June. Now, nearly two months later, residents are still trying to repair damages and return to their normal routines. And they want to see administrative and structural changes in Canton, so that a situation like this doesn’t happen again, or at minimum, loss can be proactively mitigated.
Gregg Ulrickson, a landlord on North Cedar Street, said his apartments filled with 2 feet of water during the flood. All the drywall in the building needed to be replaced, along with the cabinets and furniture.
“It’s everything,” he said. “There’s just no end to it.”
More: Canton residents lambaste mayor, commissioner for lack of emergency flooding response plan
Ulrickson expects to re-paint everything by the end of the week and wants to begin renting out apartments again by Oct. 1, after residents were forced to leave their units. But outside his apartments, large pieces of the street are still missing because of the deluge of water.
“That I know of, there was no city resources to help,” Ulrickson said. “But they said 10 years ago, this would only happen once every 100 years […] Their infrastructure needs help, needs to be redone.”
Trintje Nordlie has lived on North Cedar Street for 36 years. She remembers the last flood of this size a decade ago.
“Why is it that every 10 years, we get a waterfall down this road?” Nordlie asked. “Canton is not really wanting a swimming pool, they want these streets fixed.”
The city of Canton broke ground on its outdoor swimming pool project in 2023, which has an estimated value of $6.8 million according to Construction Journal.
During the torrential rainfall in June, Nordlie and her husband were up all night trying to get the rainwater and sewage out of their basement. She said she had not received any guidance from the city.
“They just tell you, ‘Oh, you can do it on your own.’ Well, you can’t do it on your own,” Nordlie said, though she did not specify who told her.
Meanwhile, volunteer firefighters went home to home throughout the city in the immediate days after, using smaller diversion pumps to help residents push water out of their homes to street drains, with at least one instance taking three to five hours alone.
In a City Commission meeting on Aug. 5, 2024, more than a month later, the commissioners passed a motion to have an engineer look at North Cedar Street and determine the best way to avoid flooding during future natural disaster events.
Canton resident Miranda Oien said the city had helped residents by allowing damaged belongings to be brought to the high school parking lot to be disposed of by the city.
But even this initiative was originally started by Canton resident Joseph Kumlien, after he found out that the roads to the City of Canton rubble site were flooded with water.
Oien said the city neglected to update its natural disaster emergency plan, which hadn’t been updated since 2003. A public letter from Mayor Sandi Lundstrom on June 27 to residents confirmed this, with the understanding the city would be conducting an evaluation of areas where the city fell short and creating an action plan to improve the “community’s readiness for future events.”
“This isn’t the first time this kind of flood has happened,” Kumlien said. “It was really crazy, the amount of non-plan that they had in place for a big flood.”
On Holiday Drive, water rushed down the sloped street and into residents’ houses, while water from the small lake behind them simultaneously spilled over into their backyards.
Jason Steinmetz’s home on Holiday Drive filled with 3 feet of water. His two teenage children had to park their cars on the street during the flood, and both cars were totaled from water damage.
Almost two months later, his two teenagers are still living out of plastic boxes in their basement, where the sheetrock, carpeting and bathroom all needed to be replaced.
Steinmetz and his wife are both teachers, so they have been watching YouTube tutorials and restoring their house at night after work.
“We have three kids, so we didn’t have, you know, a ton of extra money to be throwing at redoing all that stuff,” he said. “Plus, we’re replacing cars.”
More: ‘Not much sleep:’ Residents share stories of flooding impact
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, offers resources and compensation for survivors of disasters after a major disaster declaration has been declared.
In a Aug. 15 press release, President Joe Biden signed off on a major disaster declaration for South Dakota after Gov. Kristi Noem formally requested one on July 26 for 25 counties in with severe flood damage, including Lincoln County, where Canton is the seat.
Several Canton residents, including Steinmetz, reported that FEMA stopped by to look at their homes in early August, but they haven’t heard anything more. As of Monday, FEMA inspectors were finally starting to conduct damage inspections in Canton homes, along with other surrounding areas affected.
“You didn’t really hear much, you know, from the mayor on what’s going on,” Steinmetz said as of Tuesday. “My wife had to get on the Facebook page and be like, ‘Hey, did anyone hear that FEMA was in town?’”
Amy Bergren lives on South Pleasant Street, where she and her neighbors have had multiple sewage backups in their homes in the past month and a half.
Residents of Pleasant Street cannot drink their tap water, which is often brown and smells like sewage, but they still have to wash their dishes with the water and bathe in it.
After the flooding in June, Bergren said her family had to use the bathroom outside for eight days. The city did not provide any portable toilets or other restroom options for them.
Canton was on wastewater restrictions for about six days following the flooding because of sewer backup and water system issues. And in the time since, the city has experienced at least five or six water main breaks and two or three water service disruptions.
As of Wednesday morning, Canton residents were alerted by the city they may notice a loss of water pressure due to water tower maintenance. Pressure was expected to resume when maintence was complete.
But Bergren said her neighbor’s dogs are getting sick from the sewage backups. Another neighbor has three kids, who are all starting their school year sleeping on air mattresses upstairs after their basement filled with sewage.
“It’s just been a nightmare, like one thing after another. We can’t leave our homes without wondering if we’re gonna come home to a mess,” Bergren said. “We’re tired of the city not taking accountability.”
More: Canton, South Dakota mayor promises change after residents criticize flood response
A construction project on Pleasant Street is intended to provide new sewer lines, storm sewers and water mains. Bergren said she was told by city commissioners that the project would be done by Oct. 13.
The sewage backup within the last week on South Pleasant Street was accidentally caused by the construction company working on the street.
However, Bergren said the construction company took accountability for the backup and paid for a cleaning company to clean the basements of those affected.
The city did not provide sanitation resources to the residents on Pleasant Street after the first few sewage backups. In a statement released on Aug. 9 to DakotaNewsNow, Lundstrom said these backups were caused by old infrastructure that couldn’t handle the large amounts of water entering its system after the flood.
“This has been an ongoing problem for years,” Lundstrom wrote.
Bergren said that during the flood, Canton needed a city administrator who would work directly with residents to handle financial and utility issues like this.
City commissioner Paul Garbers echoed this sentiment on June 24 at a City Commission meeting, where Canton residents expressed their anger at the lack of flood planning and resources.
“We need an administrator in this town to get the s–t done,” Garbers said, to applause from residents in the crowd at the meeting. “I am ready to be done (on the commission), because it sure ain’t worth the $2,000.”
Lundstrom responded to this critique via the June letter to the public posted to Canton’s website, where she wrote:
“Given the current natural disaster, it has become clear to me that our city requires the expertise of a qualified city administrator now instead of later […] I will collaborate with city officials, commissioners, staff and community leaders to create a proposal for hiring a dedicated professional city administrator.”
In following Canton City Commission meetings, residents have asked for a better city communication policy so that they don’t have to find all their information through social media
“I don’t know what else they want us to do,” Bergren said. “We’re financially drained. We’re exhausted, because we are constantly cleaning up a mess that we shouldn’t have to clean up.”
Lundstrom declined to comment and city officials have not responded after multiple attempts to reach out.
South Dakota
After Standing Rock, could a canceled mine project offer a roadmap for opponents of a new oil pipeline in South Dakota?
Almost exactly a decade since the start of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline gained national and international attention, new disputes are simmering over tribal rights in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Earlier this month, an environmental organization and a Native American advocacy group sued the US Forest Service, claiming that an exploratory graphite drilling project on national forest land threatened a recognized ceremonial site on mountain meadows known as Pe’ Sla, or Reynolds Prairie.
But on Friday, Pete Lien and Sons, the company behind the project, abruptly withdrew, saying it would perform reclamation on the site and would not seek to file another plan. The decision came as a striking victory for Native American tribes and environmental groups that had opposed it – but other projects in the works may not meet the same conclusion.
The project, claimed nine groups within the Sioux Nation, including the Standing Rock Sioux, would “directly and significantly” affect the use of Pe’ Sla, which sits within Ȟe Sápa, the Lakota name for the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, itself the locus of Lakota creation myths.
A second exploratory project by a Canadian company looking to mine uranium on state-owned land could affect Craven Canyon, an area that contains 7,000-year-old sites of importance to Indigenous tribes, historians and archaeologists.
Opposition to the twin projects – backed by Pete Lien, of Rapid City, and by Clean Nuclear Energy Corp – comes as a proposed Alberta-to-Wyoming pipeline for carrying Canadian crude oil to the US is close to securing commitments from oil companies after Donald Trump granted permitting through an executive order.
All the projects have at their heart issues of extraction, water safety and sacred sites, much as the Standing Rock dispute of 2016 that saw “water protesters” gather in a standoff with law enforcement over concerns regarding water safety and sacred sites.
That case began when the Standing Rock Sioux passed a resolution stating that “the Dakota Access Pipeline poses a serious risk to the very survival of our Tribe and … would destroy valuable cultural resources” and was a violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteeing the “undisturbed use and occupation” of reservation lands surrounding the pipeline.
In the aftermath, the environmental group Greenpeace was ordered to pay damages of $345m by a North Dakota judge to pipeline company Energy Transfer and subsidiary Dakota Access in connection with the protests, an order that is set to go to appeal. Greenpeace claims the legal action is designed to silence activists.
Most of the current disputes relate to energy, reflecting the Trump administration’s drive toward US energy independence and away from dependence on foreign sources, particularly China. Graphite, used in electric vehicle batteries, is almost exclusively imported. Roughly 95%–99% of uranium is purchased from foreign sources, including Russia and Kazakhstan.
The pipeline deal, meanwhile, is expected to help increase oil output from Canada, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to around 6.1m barrels a day, up from 5.5m now. Bridger, the company behind the Alberta-to-Wyoming pipeline, has said the project was being developed in response to identified market interest.
Wizipan “Little Elk” Garriott, a member of NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights group opposing the mining at Pe’ Sla, says the entire process of approval for the planned mine “happened in the dark”.
“There was no notice that they were proceeding provided to us, nor to the sovereign tribal nations,” he says, in violation of environmental and cultural impact study requirements and consultations with the tribes.
Lilias Jarding, director of the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, one of the parties in the victorious Pe’ Sla action, says the decade since Standing Rock has seen a huge growth in projects attempting to mine tribal lands and areas of ceremonial significance.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, the push for both minerals extraction and energy has dramatically increased. “They’re being more aggressive,” Jarding says. In the case of Pe’ Sla, he adds, the company didn’t stop drilling when the lawsuits was filed: “They started drilling 24 hours a day.”
The alliance, along with tribes, claim the graphite project violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and that the US Forest Service improperly used a process known as a “categorical exclusion” to bypass reviews.
Oglala Sioux president Frank Star Comes Out said in a statement that the Sioux tribes never ceded to the US the lands in the Black Hills, which, he said, “remain the spiritual center of the Great Sioux Nation and they are not for sale, lease or exploitation” and that the lawsuit is a “united tribal response to protect a sacred site from those who continue to desecrate our ancestral lands”.
Oglala activist Taylor Gunhammer said that drilling at Pe’ Sla was akin to “drilling under the Vatican or at a sacred site in Jerusalem”.
A representative of Clean Nuclear Energy Corp, Mike Blady, said the company was “aware of the cultural significance and are doing everything in our power to ensure that there is no collateral damage”.
Will this amount to a populist action similar to Standing Rock?
The Pe’ Sla dispute did not provoke the kind of Indigenous-led, grassroots resistance to fossil-fuel infrastructure projects that accompanied the Dakota Access pipeline, which in some ways became a template for contemporary protests, powered by social media, celebrities and politicians.
The tribes were not in favor of following in that direction, Jarding says: “It’s a deeply sacred spiritual and ceremonial site, and elders have made it clear that it’s not a good place for another Standing Rock with thousands of people. They say this is not the place.”
Under the Biden administration, the tribal groups felt they were entering into a period of co-management policy over federal lands that in many cases lie within treaty agreements. But under the Trump administration, that sense of co-operation has diminished.
“We’ve seen a ramp-up of opening up federal lands for mineral and gas exploration, but as a planet we need to be moving away from fossil fuels and toward policies that are sustainable into the future,” says NDN’s Garriott.
What was planned for Pe’ Sla now, or was happening at Standing Rock a decade ago, or has indeed happened over a long history of disputes between sovereign tribal groups and the US government, he says, is “protecting our land and protecting our water, not only for ourselves but for the planet. We’re not random protesters out there – we’re protecting our own land”.
The South Dakota Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.
Here’s a look at May 9, 2026, results for each game:
Winning Powerball numbers from May 9 drawing
15-41-46-47-56, Powerball: 22, Power Play: 2
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Lotto America numbers from May 9 drawing
08-12-13-27-42, Star Ball: 04, ASB: 04
Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Dakota Cash numbers from May 9 drawing
01-02-04-08-18
Check Dakota Cash payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from May 9 drawing
08-11-17-29-49, Bonus: 02
Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
Are you a winner? Here’s how to claim your prize
- Prizes of $100 or less: Can be claimed at any South Dakota Lottery retailer.
- Prizes of $101 or more: Must be claimed from the Lottery. By mail, send a claim form and a signed winning ticket to the Lottery at 711 E. Wells Avenue, Pierre, SD 57501.
- Any jackpot-winning ticket for Dakota Cash or Lotto America, top prize-winning ticket for Lucky for Life, or for the second prizes for Powerball and Mega Millions must be presented in person at a Lottery office. A jackpot-winning Powerball or Mega Millions ticket must be presented in person at the Lottery office in Pierre.
When are the South Dakota Lottery drawings held?
- Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Mega Millions: 10 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
- Lucky for Life: 9:38 p.m. CT daily.
- Lotto America: 9:15 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
- Dakota Cash: 9 p.m. CT on Wednesday and Saturday.
- Millionaire for Life: 10:15 p.m. CT daily.
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a South Dakota editor. You can send feedback using this form.
RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – A Rapid City church is hosting a free community event Thursday to raise awareness about human trafficking, with organizers saying the danger may be closer than people think.
The Lutheran Women’s Missionary League at Bethlehem Lutheran Church is opening the presentation to the entire community because organizers say awareness alone can save a life.
“If we can get 20 people to understand what to look for — if we can get 20 people to understand that this organization exists — then we can start shining light into every corner, and suddenly it’ll be a better world,” said Alexandra Loverink, co-president of LWML Bethlehem Lutheran Church.
Event details
The free presentation is Thursday, May 14 at 6 p.m. at Bethlehem Lutheran Church on Rushmore Street. The speaker is Reverend Tess Franzen, founder of Freedom’s Journey, a Rapid City-based ministry that has assisted hundreds of trafficking survivors over more than a decade.
Franzen said the problem in South Dakota is far more widespread than most people realize.
“We see mostly sex trafficking, but much of what we see is — some people might call it homegrown or familial,” Franzen said. “We see trafficking here where young people are being trafficked out, their family members are selling access to them when they’re children. And in many cases, they don’t really even realize there’s anything wrong with it.”
Organizer Cari Garwood-Beard said Franzen’s presentation changed how she sees her own neighborhood, and she wants others to have that same wake-up call.
“She told a story about her neighbor one time — just a good old guy — and found out that he was a trafficker. Her neighbor, who she thought was above boards,” Garwood-Beard said. “And it really hit home. My next-door neighbor could be.”
A freewill offering will be collected for Freedom’s Journey at Thursday’s event. Bethlehem Lutheran Church is at 1630 Rushmore Street.
Resources
If you suspect trafficking, dial 9-1-1 or the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.
For more information about Freedom’s Journey, visit their website or call 805.380.8009.
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