TWO KILLED, TWO INJURED IN IOWA VEHICLE CRASH SATURDAY
CRAIG, IA – A two-vehicle accident killed two people and sent two others to the hospital late Saturday night. The Iowa State Patrol responded to an accident near Craig, Iowa around 10:30 Saturday night.
Iowa State Patrol says 43-year-old Julio Pena of Le Mars, IA, in a 2000 Chevrolet pickup truck failed to stop at the rural intersection of K-22 and was struck by a private ambulance service, which was transporting 94-year-old Ernest Petty of Elk Point, South Dakota with non-threatening injuries.
State officials say Pena and Petty were pronounced deceased on scene and transported to Floyd Valley Hospital by the Le Mars Fire and Rescue. They were not wearing seatbelts at the time of the incident according to officials.
Officials say the ambulance’s driver sustained minor injuries while the ambulance’s medic sustained serious injuries. They were both taken to Hawarden Hospital.
The driver and medic of the ambulance were identified as 21-year-old Courtney Johnson and 54-year-old Lisa Marie Wise, both of Sioux City, Iowa.
Johnson and Wise were reportedly wearing seatbelts at the time of the accident, according to State Patrol Officers.
The Iowa State Patrol was assisted by first responders from Le Mars Fire and Rescue, the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Office and Hawarden Ambulance.
SUMMIT BUYS EASEMENTS FROM NAVIGATOR, SEEKING TO STREAMLINE PROJECT
SOUTH DAKOTA Undated (Jack O’Connor / States Newsroom) – Summit Carbon Solutions has purchased old land easement agreements from a former rival company to help speed up its carbon pipeline construction project, Summit officials confirm.
Summit’s former rival, Navigator CO2, attempted its own carbon dioxide pipeline project before backing out in October 2023. With Navigator out of the picture, Summit has purchased many of Navigator’s old agreements to expand its coverage area and save itself time by not needing to negotiate new agreements.
Summit received approval in June from the Iowa Utilities Board, now called Iowa Utilities Commission, on its pipeline project. With the permit approval, Summit was given the power of eminent domain to force unwilling landowners into easement agreements.
The proposed project plan would build pipelines in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota to carry captured carbon dioxide from ethanol plants and transport it to underground reservoirs in North Dakota.
Roadblocks for Summit remain
Iowa is the only state to give Summit the green light so far. Before Summit begins construction in Iowa, the organization still has a handful of roadblocks to overcome.
The Iowa Utilities Commission is requiring Summit to refile several documents to receive a permit. Summit is also still in the middle of lawsuits it filed against Iowa counties that have attempted to restrict the placement of pipelines.
Additionally, Summit still needs approval in South Dakota and North Dakota for pipelines to be placed in Iowa.
Summit will also be limited from engaging in any new easement agreements with landowners until the organization holds public informational meetings in affected counties as required by law.
Summit has released its schedule for 23 public informational meetings about the project across 23 different counties throughout August and September. The times and locations of the meetings can be read here.
The Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club, an environmentalist activist group, has pledged to fight against Summit’s pipeline efforts. The group is currently working with impacted landowners to oppose the project.
“The public comment period is our chance to tell the truth about carbon pipelines and the dangers they pose to our land, our families and our communities,” the Sierra Club wrote on its website. “We also need to make sure impacted landowners know they DO NOT have to sign an easement.”
Summit could also face challenges in the Legislature When Navigator wanted to connect pipelines from Iowa to Illinois, Illinois state lawmakers passed a two-year moratorium on new carbon dioxide pipelines.
In past sessions, the Iowa House of Representatives have passed three fairly bipartisan bills that would limit or regulate the use of eminent domain for these projects. However, none of the bills managed to pass the Iowa Senate.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has expressed support for the benefits carbon dioxide capture could have on the Iowa agriculture industry as long as the benefits account for landowner rights.
On Thursday, after a tour of the Chevron Renewable Energy Group’s facility in Newton, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks praised pipelines as a way to aid Iowa’s ethanol industry but avoided advocating for or against eminent domain by calling it a state issue, not a federal one.
“I would say that farmers and property owners need to look at the why, the rationale, and then determine if it’s in their best interest,” Miller-Meeks said. “Companies that are acquiring easements are looking at, ‘How do you make the land whole? How do you ensure farmers that you can grow crops in the near future, the timing, restructure so that land is put back in the position it was before they put in the pipeline?’”
Which agreements are being bought?
Summit isn’t purchasing every agreement made by Navigator, Summit spokesperson Sabrina Zenor said. The land easement agreements Navigator made for its proposed route did not always align with Summit’s route.
Some easement agreements in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and North Dakota have already been purchased but Zenor said the number of easement agreements purchased and when Summit will finish buying the old Navigator agreements it wants can’t be confirmed yet.
Summit notified some landowners whose easement agreement was purchased via letters mailed to them.
“Summit has acquired right-of-way easement options previously held by Navigator CO2, including the option(s) you signed with Navigator CO2,” Lee Blank, Summit’s chief executive, wrote in a letter to landowners whose easement agreements Summit purchased. “These options provide us with right-of-way access along expansion routes to the POET and Valero ethanol plants that have recently been added to our project.”
With the Iowa Utilities Commission declining to reconsider its permit approval, another lawsuit involving the pipeline project from either landowners, environmental activists or Iowa counties is likely.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND HEALTHCARE
SOUTH DAKOTA, Undated (John Hult / South Dakota Searchlight) – Health researchers in South Dakota and across the U.S. want to use artificial intelligence (AI) to do things like cure cancer, predict the onset of Alzheimer’s and diabetes earlier, and diagnose and address disparities in the impact of kidney disease.
But first, they need data.
Lots of data.
Data housed by government agencies, hospitals and other health care facilities, drugmakers, research institutions and insurers.
Two leaders with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) told lawmakers this week that connecting researchers with data to train and refine AI medical applications also must be done in a way that safeguards citizen privacy and includes data from underserved and vulnerable populations.
The NIH representatives spoke virtually on Wednesday to members of the Legislature’s Study Committee on Artificial Intelligence and Regulation of Internet Access by Minors.
“Data is what drives artificial intelligence,” said Susan Gregurick of the NIH. “We need data relevant to individuals and to patients in real time and in high quality.”
The NIH has put nearly $1 billion into research and development of machine learning and AI medical research since 2019, Gregurick said, with $296 million in spending in 2023 alone.
A University of South Dakota professor named Bill Harris has been awarded multiple NIH grants over the course of his career. His latest award, for $506,000, supports research into an AI-powered model that looks at patterns of fatty acids in blood samples to predict a patient’s odds of developing Alzheimer’s disease about four years sooner than doctors can now.
Dr. Harris is a professor at the University of South Dakota School of Medicine, but is pursuing the AI research through his company, OmegaQuant.
Another South Dakota project falls under the NIH’s “Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity,” program, or AIM-AHEAD. That project has South Dakota State University Professor Semhar Michael looking into the use of machine learning to ferret out disparities in health outcomes for populations affected by end-stage kidney disease.
The SDSU project, which includes partners from Dakota State University, Sanford Health and other researchers in and outside of South Dakota, was awarded a two-year grant worth just over $1 million.
Gregurick of the NIH said that the SDSU project is one of 274 around the country funded through the AIM-AHEAD initiative.
Gregurick said AI research in health care is still in its beginning stages. The NIH hopes to see more “multimodal” AI projects in the future. Such efforts would seek to integrate AI-informed data produced by analyzing things like blood or tissue samples with other sources like voice recognition data. Voice recognition data could help train AI models to detect changes in speech patterns in hopes of triangulating the trajectory of cognitive decline and offer earlier interventions for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.
Privacy concerns
But none of the research can be done ethically unless there are guardrails to protect patient data, according to Lyric Jorgenson, the NIH’s associate director for science policy.
Anonymizing data to scrub names and other personally identifying information will be important, as will gaining the consent and support of patients at the point of data collection.
“We do want to understand the risks of sharing information, especially with people who shouldn’t have access to it,” Jorgenson said. “Think of it as putting information in a safe, and only your family has access.”
She said communication with patients and communities will be key – the NIH is funding outreach and education efforts on AI and data collection, in addition to research into data use – but basic data security practices also need some adjustment.
Putting data in the cloud, versus putting it on a flash drive that can be passed from person to person, will be part of that.
Data in the cloud can be walled off and provided only to those who’ve been vetted, according to Jorgenson, and a cloud dataset’s manager can see who is accessing the data and when. Data that’s downloaded and saved onto a hard drive or flash drive can’t be tracked and managed with that level of precision, she said.
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-South Dakota, told state lawmakers that the U.S. is in a better position to protect privacy than countries like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia or China, the last of which collects data through surveillance systems to monitor its citizens.
“Do you want AI to be developed in a place like that?” Rounds said.
Rounds to state lawmakers: Encourage AI development in South Dakota
Rounds has been a leader in the Senate on AI issues, part of a bipartisan group of lawmakers that’s met with tech industry heavyweights in hopes of informing other elected officials about the benefits and potential pitfalls of the technology.
AI research, particularly in the areas of data quality, represents an opportunity for South Dakota’s younger generation, he said, as an AI model is only as good as the data it’s trained on.
Schools like Dakota State University, which has invested heavily in cybersecurity and other data science programs, are well-positioned to do that work.
“These huge databases have got to be accurate,” Rounds said.
Pumping funds into medical research might seem expensive, he said, but so is managing a host of diseases that AI research could prevent or cure with the right investment.
“It’s not inexpensive, but compared to what we pay to try and limit and prevent the illnesses to be cured, the investment is miniscule,” Rounds said.
Lawmakers on the study group wanted to know what, if anything, they could do to help move the research along.
“You talked about not slowing down the progress of AI, but at the same time, there’s got to be policies and oversight managing the implementation of this, and probably training as well,” said Rep. Chris Karr, R-Sioux Falls.
The main goal, Rounds said, should be to “stay ahead” of AI development. Supporting education programs that focus on AI systems and maintaining a business-friendly atmosphere could help position the state to take advantage of the new technology, Rounds said.
“I would do everything I could to incentivize the development of AI databases here, in all different areas,” Rounds said. “It becomes a nexus for other things to happen.”
Companies looking to develop data centers or AI hubs, Rounds said, are “going to go where doing business is as simple as possible.”
