Last weekend the Marshall area experienced a deluge, a large amount of rain in a short time span.

About 8 inches of rain fell late on Friday night. I slept right through it, didn’t even realize we had so much until I checked my rain gauge and noticed that it was filled past the six inch mark. I drove by Independence Park and saw that the pond was filled to capacity.

I knew we had a flood. My next door neighbor told me about a friend who finished work in the late evening and tried to drive home on East Lyon St. The car got caught in water. It had to be towed to a shop and was probably totaled.

My basement had water on the floor. Several light weight things were shifted, so maybe at the height of the flood there was an inch or two going to the floor drain.

We’re no strangers when it comes to floods. Elderly people remember the floods of 1957 and 1969. I remember very well the floods of the 1990s. I was a young news reporter at the time.

I watched with the park ranger at Camden State Park in 1993 as the Flint Ridge hiking trail slowly collapsed. The hillside gave way, leaving the railroad tracks suspended in the air. The tracks were rebuilt after the flood using a massive amount of rocks to replace the hill.

I remember the basement problems in houses, especially in the tree streets on the north side of Marshall. The city invested a large amount of time and money to have improved flood control, and it undoubtedly paid off last weekend.

Four years after the 1993 floods we had 1997 Minnesota River flood in Montevideo and Granite Falls. I was there in downtown Granite Falls at the height of the flood. I watched the steps disappear at Lende Plaza.

I was the last car to cross the bridge on Highway 23 before they closed the road. The Yellow Medicine County highway department told me when I had to go home because of the impending bridge closure.

Even with our past flood experiences it seems like our heavy rain in 2025 is part of a pattern, that it ties in with all the weather disasters we’ve been having throughout the nation.

We’ve had wildfires in the western states. We’ve had hurricanes in the southeast. We’ve had floods in many parts of the country, including the Guadeloupe River flood in the Texas hill country that killed more than 100 people earlier this month. We’ve also had widespread tornadoes.

Skeptics on climate change say that it’s all part of a natural cycle, that the earth is warming and becoming less stable but that it’s done the same thing over many centuries.

There’s nothing they can say that would convince me it’s all natural. I think the pollution of the 19th and 20th centuries has taken its toll on our climate and our natural resources.

I have a copy of a magazine article from 1978 about how pollution probably affects climate. It basically says the same thing that scientists say in 2025.

That means we’ve known for almost 50 years that we might be harming our planet. Still they’ve let industries pollute. Still we pound the pavement with our cars and let our petroleum based engines create air emissions.

Every weather disaster creates further evidence. Our advances in wind energy and solar power have been good but we need to go beyond that. We need goals to diversify our energy sources, to make renewable resources a vital part of our strategy.

It’s not easy. There’s no single resource that’s going to serve as a solution. It has to involve a combination of energy sources.

Some of our energy will still need to come from coal, natural gas and petroleum. The main thing is to reduce our dependence on them.

When I did research on biomass energy sources for the marketing department at SMSU, I learned that in Vermont they’ve heated many public buildings with wood. It’s even heated the state capitol building in Montpelier.

Tree farms seem to offer good possibilities. Northern Minnesota would be a good location for them. They could be helpful to the environment while providing an energy resource for the future.

The bottom line is that we should take action. If we don’t know whether we’re causing climate change to get worse, it only makes sense to change now, to make things like electric cars standard bearers. We only have one planet. We need to be good stewards who take care of it.

— Jim Muchlinski is longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent