A day after a storm ripped through the western Iron Range, Grand Rapids Mayor Dale Christy saw good coming from a bad situation.
âThe cool part here is with all the division there is in society, you see neighbor helping neighbor,â Christy said. âIt s a good thing.â
For the second time in three days, thunderstorms on Monday evening ripped across northeastern Minnesota.
In Grand Rapids, the destruction was âhorrible,â Julie Kennedy, Grand Rapids Public Utilities general manager said.
âWe had 5,000 outages out of 7,500 customers,â Kennedy said. âWe re annihilated. The town is unbelievable.â
Trees fell on power lines and on homes throughout the city, Kennedy said.
Ida Rukavina grew up in a family that valued education, hard work, art, and culture.
Rukavina intends to bring those same principles to her new job as Range Association of Municipalities & Schools (RAMS) executive director.
âBoth of my parents taught me that all jobs have value and we should respect all work,â Rukavina said. âMy grandfather on one side was a miner and my grandfather on the other side a logger. My grandmother was a cleaner at Virginia Public Utilities, my other grandmother worked in the post office, and my mother was an art teacher. I had strong people on both sides who influenced me.â
VIRGINIA â Chris Knight, publisher of the former Mesabi Daily News and now Mesabi Tribune, is remembering Bill Hanna as a committed journalist who wasnât afraid to take on any issue in search of the truth. Knight s words are those echoed by many colleagues and friends in remarks to the Mesabi Tribune in the wake of Hanna s death.
Hanna, former executive editor of the Mesabi Daily News and award-winning journalist, died early Monday morning, January 11, at his home in Virginia/Mountain Iron.
Hanna had been with the Mesabi Daily News from the mid-1980s until 2016, when he had a life-changing heart attack. He successfully underwent a heart transplant in 2017, receiving the heart of a young man who had died tragically. Later Hanna was diagnosed with terminal cancer, for which he had radiation and chemotherapy until December. He had been in hospice care since December 24. Hanna had been with the paper more than 30 years, joining the staff in the mid-1980s and serving as mana