On June 7, 2026, severe storms, straight line winds and tornadoes started tearing across the northwest corner of North Dakota. They ran through June 9.
The major disaster declaration came on September 1. That’s 84 days after the storms ended. The SBA’s notice about it landed in the Federal Register on September 15 at 91 FR 58520, another two weeks later.
If that sounds slow, here’s the part that should bother you more. For North Dakota, it’s normal.
The notice
- FEMA 4934 DR. Severe Storms, Straight line Winds, and Tornadoes. Incident period June 7 through June 9, 2026.
- Seven counties: Bottineau, Burke, Divide, McLean, Mercer, Oliver and Williams.
- Public Assistance Only. That’s the phrase in the title of the notice, and it’s doing a lot of work.
- Who can apply to SBA: private non profit organizations providing essential services of a governmental nature. That’s the whole list.
- Physical loan deadline: November 1, 2026. Economic injury deadline: June 1, 2027.
- Loan numbers: 21861B for physical damage and 218620 for economic injury. Signed by James Stallings, Associate Administrator, Office of Disaster Recovery and Resilience.
Eighty four days is right in the middle of the pack
We pulled every major disaster declaration for North Dakota since 2017 from OpenFEMA, left out COVID, and counted the days from the last day of each incident to the day it was declared. There are 14 of them.
The fastest was 45 days, for the April 2019 flooding. The slowest was 93 days, for the storms and flooding that ended July 1, 2020. The median is 77 days. Nine of the fourteen took 75 days or longer.
This year’s 84 is the fourth longest wait on the list. It’s not an outlier. It’s the system.
And here’s a strange one. In 2021, a severe storm hit North Dakota starting June 7, and the major disaster declaration for it, FEMA 4613, came on September 1. Five years later, same start date, same declaration date. Nobody planned that. It’s just what twelve weeks looks like, twice.
Fourteen declarations, zero for households
This is the number we didn’t expect. In OpenFEMA’s records, none of those 14 declarations turned on the Individuals and Households Program. Not one, in almost a decade of floods, blizzards, wildfires and tornadoes.
That’s what “Public Assistance Only” means in plain English. Federal money goes to rebuilding public things: roads, culverts, public buildings, utilities. And on the SBA side, this notice opens loans only to certain non profits. There’s nothing in it for a homeowner in Williams County with a roof in the yard, or a shop owner in Bottineau with a flooded back room.
SBA can open home and business loans through its own separate declarations. This notice isn’t one of those.
The rate table is short for a reason
The interest rate table in most SBA disaster notices has rows for homeowners, businesses and non profits, split by whether you could get credit somewhere else. This one has three rows, all for non profits, and every one of them says 3.625 percent.
The homeowner and business rows aren’t there because homeowners and businesses aren’t in this notice. The table tells you who was left out before the text does.
The clock that matters
The physical damage deadline is November 1, 2026. That’s 61 days after the declaration and only 47 days after the notice showed up in the Federal Register. Counted from the day the storms stopped, it’s 145 days, and 84 of those went by before anyone could apply at all.
So if you run an eligible non profit in one of those seven counties, the window is open now, and it’s shorter than it looks. Applications go through the MySBA Loan Portal at lending.sba.gov, or by phone at 1 800 659 2955.
Everybody else in northwest North Dakota got a notice that isn’t for them, three months after the storm that was.