By Seth Tupper, South Dakota Searchlight
June 27, 2024

Severe weather brought a deluge to southeast South Dakota recently and exposed Gov. Kristi Noem’s faults.

While the rain fell, she abandoned the state for a political conference and television interview.

When catastrophic floodwaters surged toward McCook Lake, her cursory appearance there — along with her lackluster crisis communications and departure for an out-of-state political fundraiser — left people without adequate warning about the danger they faced.

And after declining to use the National Guard for the flood preparations or response, Noem said activating the Guard would be “extremely expensive” and asserted troops should only be used in a “very crisis situation.” This from a governor who has ordered troops to the Texas-Mexico border three times, and paid for it with money from the state’s Emergency and Disaster Fund.

According to Noem, none of that was a mistake, and she led a solid flood mitigation and response effort informed by her experience.

“We learn with every flood that happens,” she said during a Tuesday press conference.

That’s true. And there’s a lot to learn about her from this one.

‘If we don’t, then that’s wonderful’

The flooding began with three days of rain June 20-22 in southeast South Dakota, surpassing 17 inches in some locations.

The Big Sioux River swelled to a historic level and swamped several towns while flowing toward the Missouri. That’s where McCook Lake and 230 homes around it stood in the bullseye.

Meanwhile, where was Noem? Her official calendar is protected by an egregious exemption in South Dakota’s open-records laws. But some details of her travels are known, thanks to journalists such as the Argus Leader’s Dominik Dausch, who reviewed social media posts from around the country to fill in the gaps of her whereabouts.

On Saturday, June 22, Noem delivered a speech at a Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington, D.C.

On Sunday morning, June 23, she was on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” where she jousted with the host about politics and whether she’s being vetted as a running mate for Donald Trump.

By that afternoon, Noem was back in South Dakota. She led a press conference with federal, state and local officials in North Sioux City, where she talked about a voluntary evacuation order in Dakota Dunes, the construction of a temporary levee, a closure on Interstate 29, and the status of Missouri River dams.

Nobody at the press conference expressed an urgent safety concern about McCook Lake. When somebody asked what lake residents should do, Noem said they should protect their personal property, “because we do anticipate that they will take in water.”

“That’s what we’re preparing for,” she said. “If we don’t, then that’s wonderful that they don’t have an impact, but they could see water flowing into McCook Lake.”

Nobody at the press conference clearly explained that the levee under construction was intended to direct floodwaters away from North Sioux City through a slough toward McCook Lake, where the overflow would hopefully drain toward the Missouri River while causing minimal damage.

From McCook Lake to Memphis

Granted, it was tough to imagine how thoroughly the lake would be overwhelmed, because nobody’s ever seen so much water in the Big Sioux.

But that’s precisely why Noem and her advisers should have sounded alarms. She said during the Sunday press conference that the river would reach a record level the following afternoon. She knew an unprecedented situation was unfolding.

Shortly after she finished speaking, forecasters were already predicting an earlier and higher river crest. The water was rising so fast, it went up more than a foot during the press conference.

But Noem wasn’t watching the river. She slipped away Sunday evening to Tennessee, where she headlined the Shelby County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Gala in a Hilton billed as the tallest hotel in Memphis. Tickets ranged from $200 to $2,750 for the “legacy circle table.”

Back at McCook Lake that night, all hell broke loose. The Big Sioux surged over Interstate 29 and slammed into houses on the lake’s north shore. Local authorities scrambled to alert residents, and rescue teams spent the night and the next morning hauling stunned people to safety.

Noem returned to South Dakota for press conferences Monday and Tuesday, where she described the carnage: “We have whole homes that have fallen into the lake. We’ve got hundred-foot drop-offs from washouts, we’ve got live power lines laying across the roads, we’ve got boats stuck in trees, we’ve got trees that are half-falling over.”

According to her, it was unavoidable.

“That mitigation plan would’ve worked in a lesser event,” she said, “but there was so much water that flowed through there.”

Well, yes, just like she knew it would. She said Sunday afternoon that the Big Sioux would crest at an all-time high, and she knew the excess water would be diverted to McCook Lake. That’s why people living around the lake needed the clear and loud warning they didn’t receive until it was too late — the kind of warning Noem’s predecessor, Gov. Dennis Daugaard, provided before a 2014 flood in the same area when he said, “I am very concerned for residents near McCook Lake.”

As Noem said, there’s something to learn from every flood, and the people of McCook Lake learned a painful lesson: Neither hell nor high water will stop Kristi Noem from pursuing her own ambition at the expense of the people she serves.

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Seth Tupper is editor-in-chief of South Dakota Searchlight. He was previously a supervising senior producer for South Dakota Public Broadcasting and a newspaper journalist in Rapid City and Mitchell.

South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.

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