Bemidji Brewing co-owner helps residents recover from June storm damage

A Bemidji Brewing co-owner who avoided damage at her home north of Bemidji stepped into a different kind of recovery job after the June 21, 2025 windstorm. Megan Hill has served since October as a disaster recovery case manager for the Bemidji Long Term Storm Recovery Group, helping residents work through the slow, frustrating tasks that follow major storm damage.

Hill’s role filled a need that did not end when the trees came down and the power came back on. United Way of the Bemidji Area said the June windstorm caused significant damage across the Bemidji area, then launched a Disaster Relief Fund and kept seeking volunteers for chainsaw work, roof repair and small home repairs. Residents could also complete a recovery assistance form so United Way could identify what people still needed and connect them with resources, including help with roof and home repair and insurance navigation.

The scale of the storm made that kind of case management necessary. The system that formed after the storm had to respond to a blast that hit around midnight, then drove hurricane-like winds of up to 120 mph through a 10-mile radius around Bemidji. On the one-year anniversary, Bemidji Mayor Jorge Prince said about 9 million trees were lost in northwestern Minnesota and estimated $10.7 million in damage to public property in the Bemidji area. Homeowners did not qualify for direct FEMA aid, leaving many residents to lean on local assistance and insurance claims instead.

State help later covered part of the public cost. Gov. Tim Walz approved disaster-assistance contingency funding that allowed local governments to be reimbursed for up to 75% of eligible public repair costs, but the private side of the disaster remained more uneven. For homeowners, the gaps were often smaller and harder to solve, roof damage, insurance problems and minor repairs that did not disappear with the first round of cleanup.

That is where Hill’s work mattered. As an integral part of the recovery group, she became one of the people helping turn a one-time emergency response into a longer support system rooted in local institutions and local trust. By May 2026, Bemidji State University and the College of St. Scholastica were also helping launch a survey to measure service use, unmet needs, mental-health impacts and resilience tied to the storm. For many Beltrami County residents, the message was clear: recovery was still underway, and the people most likely to fall through the cracks were the ones still waiting on repairs, answers and a path forward.