Local News

Storm sewer contract awarded in Fort Dodge

Another project has been added to the long list of work that has drivers navigating a maze of orange road cones throughout Fort Dodge. On Monday, the City Council awarded a contract for replacing a troublesome storm sewer along South Seventh Street that has caused two sinkholes in the last couple of years. Rasch Construction, of Fort Dodge, was awarded a $98,155 contract for the job. In a report to the council, City Engineer Austin Morrow wrote that in the spring of 2024 a sinkhole opened in Seventh Street between Fourth Avenue South and Meriwether Drive. The cause was traced to a ...

Immersed in culture

The annual Afro-Latino Festival at Iowa Central Community College will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday in the Student Resource Center on the Fort Dodge campus. The public is invited. The festival is held to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month. It highlights cultures, ...

Car crashes into FD home Monday

Stratford mourns

STRATFORD — They are the unsung heroes of every community. Across rural Iowa, where small towns are like islands in a massive sea of corn and soybeans, where the roads stretch out long and hard from any hospital or emergency room, volunteer fire and rescue departments are a lifeline for ...

Generations of service

STRATFORD — Every time Grant Carlson responded to a call for the Stratford Fire and Rescue Department, he was carrying on a family tradition. Sixty-four years ago to the month, the Stratford community mourned the death of Carlson’s grandfather, Carl Harold Larson. Like Carlson, Larson was a long-time chief for the Stratford volunteers. On Sept. 21, 1962, he responded to a fire in a pile of lumber at the co-op elevator. The fire had been almost entirely put out when Larson collapsed, according to news reports at the time. Fellow firefighters began immediate life-saving measures, but ...

‘It’s about doing things that are good for the land’

The Iowa Natural Resource & Outdoor Recreation Trust Fund has been in place since it was added to Iowa’s Constitution in 2010. It was established to provide over $200 million annually to improve soil and water quality, improve and increase outdoor recreation and help provide economic ...