What It Took to Save This Year's State Fair

"We're really blessed."

That's how State Fair Manager Peggy Besch described the state of the fairgrounds to the State Fair Commission in late July, a little more than two weeks after a tornado tore across town. If you walked through the gates this week for the South Dakota State Fair, running September 2 through 7, you likely didn't notice anything unusual. That's the point. What looks like a normal fair week this year is the product of a specific, fast, and slightly improvised recovery that started with a storm nobody expected to hit the fairgrounds directly.

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only follow the fair itself: the county still doesn't have a final number for what all of this cost. The fairgrounds reopened before anyone finished counting.

What Actually Hit the Fairgrounds

On July 2, a tornado moved through Huron. The National Weather Service later confirmed it as an EF-1, with peak winds around 90 mph, tracking roughly parallel to Highway 14 for about 2.5 miles. That tornado accounted for only part of the damage. Straight-line winds followed, including a gust near the Huron airport that hit 106 mph.

The fairgrounds took a direct hit. Large trees came down across the property. One tree crashed through a building's skylight. An announcer's stand was overturned. Power poles toppled. One building was shifted off its foundation entirely. Twenty-three families were camping on the grounds at the time, ahead of a national RV rally scheduled to open July 4. They waited it out in designated shelters. Nobody was hurt.

That last detail matters more than it might seem. A storm that damages buildings but spares people is a different kind of recovery problem than one that doesn't. It means the urgent work is cleanup and repair, not crisis response, and cleanup and repair are things a small city can solve for if it moves fast enough.

Nine Weeks, Borrowed Labor

Here's the timeline, as it actually played out:

Nine weeks between storm and gate opening isn't a lot of runway for a facility that hosts a five-day event drawing tens of thousands of people a day. What filled that gap wasn't primarily insurance money or a repair budget. It was labor the state redirected on short notice: the Department of Corrections confirmed sending inmate crews within a day of the storm, a crew size that grew as the scope of the damage became clear. Governor Larry Rhoden framed it afterward as a two-way benefit, communities getting help and inmates getting a chance to work outside on something visible. Whatever the framing, it's the reason there was a fairgrounds to open on schedule.

The cleanup didn't stay inside the fairgrounds fence, either. Within days, the effort expanded across Huron, with the city opening debris drop-off points, one at the 3rd Street lot east of the bridge, another at the city's solid waste site. A storm that damages fairgrounds infrastructure also damages the streets and yards around it, and Huron's recovery treated both as one job.

The Building That Didn't Need Saving

One detail from Besch's report to the commission is worth sitting with. The fairgrounds' newest structure, the Dakota Events Complex, known locally as the DEX, came through the storm without a scratch. It's a 150,000-square-foot facility built to convert between a cattle barn stalling up to 1,700 head and a full rodeo arena. Meanwhile, an older building on the same property was knocked off its foundation.

That's not a coincidence worth reading too much into on its own, newer construction tends to meet stricter wind codes than buildings from decades ago. But it's a useful data point for anyone thinking about the fairgrounds' next storm, not this one. The property's most recent capital investment is also its most storm-resistant asset. The buildings still carrying deferred maintenance are the ones a future storm is more likely to find.

Why Canceling Wasn't Really an Option

The numbers explain why the state moved as fast as it did. Last year's fair drew roughly 180,000 attendees, itself down about 3 percent from the year before, with 1,914 campers on site. Fairgoers spent an estimated $3.2 million on goods, services, and concessions over the run of the fair, generating more than $265,000 in tax revenue for the state.

Set that $3.2 million single-week figure against the storm's price tag. Beadle County's public property damage from the July storm, fairgrounds included, was tallied at close to $897,000, a number that became part of Governor Rhoden's request for federal disaster assistance. If approved, FEMA would cover 75 percent of the cost of repairing public property, with the county picking up 15 percent and the state 10 percent.

Read those two numbers side by side and the math behind the urgency becomes obvious. The county's total storm damage bill, spread across public property throughout Beadle County, is less than a third of what a single fair week typically brings in through local spending alone. Losing the fair over storm damage wouldn't have just been a scheduling problem. It would have been a self-inflicted economic loss several times the size of the damage that caused it.

There's a wrinkle here, too. That $897,000 county figure was finalized in late July, around the same time Besch told the commission she still didn't have a specific cost estimate for what the fairgrounds alone would need for full repairs. In other words, the number used to justify state and federal disaster assistance was set before anyone had finished pricing out the fairgrounds' own damage. The recovery didn't wait for a complete accounting. It moved on the assumption that speed mattered more than precision, and that assumption is why gates opened on schedule.

What's Still Not Finished

None of this means the fairgrounds are back to where they were before July 2. Besch's own language, "in good shape," is doing some careful work. It signals functional, not fully restored. The building that came off its foundation still needed real structural repair, not just cosmetic patching. The final repair cost, separate from the cleanup labor already logged, hadn't been priced out as of late July. If federal disaster assistance comes through, it will cover public property broadly across several counties named in the governor's request, not fairgrounds repairs specifically, so what portion of that $897,000 baseline actually reflects the fairgrounds' full recovery cost is still an open question.

If you're at the fair this week and everything looks normal, that normal was built, not restored by default. It's the product of a crew of state inmates who showed up two days after the storm, a rented crane, a group of SDSU students who spent part of their summer clearing debris on a fairground they don't own, and a decision by the city and state to move on repairs before the final bill was in.

That's worth knowing if you live here, not because it changes anything about how you spend your afternoon at the fair, but because it's the kind of story that explains how a small city keeps its biggest annual event running when the odds say it shouldn't have been able to.

If this is the kind of local detail you want more of, whether it's how Huron handles a storm, a road project, or a housing shortage the Greater Huron Development Corporation flagged earlier this year, Elevate keeps close watch on what's actually happening in this town, not just what shows up in a listing description. If you're thinking about your own place in Huron, whatever that means for you right now, feel free to schedule a consultation with Molly Hopper. She's watching the same fairgrounds you are.