PSA: Any MGoBloggers in the Tri-Cities area ...
Potentially huge disaster on-going: 2 dams on the Tittabawassee River upstream of Midland have failed, and apparently the Sanford Dam may be next. Yikes. Going to be massive flooding in Midland if that happens, and perhaps also in Freeland, Saginaw and Bay City.
Take care all .....
Sanford dam and Edenville dam have failed. I believe Smallwood dam is on the verge. M-30 bridge in Edenville has collapsed.
Getting a little bit of conflicting info. I've heard Sanford is still standing, waters spilling over, I've also heard its failed. I know Edenville is done and I've heard smallwood has failed. Either way, it sounds like Secord lake may be the last one left assuming the last one doesn't fail.
According to Mlive, the Sanford damn has been breached and its collapse is imminent. That was over an hour ago. They are evacuating the Midland hospital right now.
Once Dow floats away, everyone downstream will wish they had Flint's water.
They have an army of pumps going as we speak.
They just lost power, so I hope they have the backup generators to keep those pumps running.
Exactly what the folks at Fukushima Daiichi said too. Oh my!
We were evacuated right away due to our proximity to the Sanford dam. But our evacuation site is also now in danger. They are calling for 12 ft over flood level. Wish us luck...
downtown midland this morning. per the freep, the circle in the middle is the roof of the farmers market. yikes.
State just said Midland could be under 9 feet of water in the coming hours
My dad just said the river is predicted to crest over 4 inches above its previous high.
Four FEET over the record high. https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=dtx&gage=midm4
Sounds like it's going to be a lot worse than that. Water is already breaching the dam in Sanford. Even if somehow the dam holds, downtown Midland and surrounding areas are screwed.
Crazy thing is that photo is relatively normal. The farmers market has been underwater like that at least 2-3 other times in the 2010s. Our house has never been considered to be in danger, but we were told to evacuate tonight due to the break of the dams.
Side note that I hope is interesting: last year as a senior at UM I took a class on natural disasters and my professor (Joon Ahn I believe) basically said that America has effed up all of its rivers with levees and dams. He said that because of those measures it has actually raised the riverbed and makes ‘100 year’ or ‘500 year’ floods like this one happen every 5-10 years. FWIW he said other prominent cities like AA and GR are going to have problems with this in the future, not just Midland.
I found it interesting. +1
I know that area very well. When I lived in the Midland area for a few years back in the 90s, we first leased a home across the street from Sanford Lake. I'm guessing it got flooded today.
And a friend who owns a home on Wixom Lake evacuated yesterday; he and his wife were able to return home this evening once the damn in Edenville broke. They lucked out, as their home is on high enough ground----just barely---that they narrowly avoided flood damage, except for a damaged dock and shed. He told me that as of tonight, his new problem is that he no longer has lake frontage and probably won't for an indefinite period of time.
And now I'm seeing news reports that floodwater has breached the Sanford dam as of the last hour.
ANYONE DOWNSTREAM OF SANFORD LAKE, GET OUT OF THERE NOW!
I remember the Tridge. Grandparents lived a few hundred feet from Sanford Dam.
What the hell caused 2(?) damn dams to collapse?
The edenville damn was in need of repairs but nobody wanted to foot the bill. So it collapsed. That was how it was explained to me by my uncle who has a cottage on Wixom lake.
The sanford damn was fine but there is too much water now and it is breaching over the top. The damn isn't designed for that and it is only a matter of time before it collapses from the stress. There is another damn right in front of Dow Chemical, but that damn is short and is designed to not fail with water breaching over the top.
I believe the Edenville dam was shutdown a year or 2 ago. They opened up the gates and drained the lake. I believe the Wixom lake association bought it and it was a work in progress. This is all by memory so I may be off on this.
Smallwood dam is above the Edenville dam and I don't know if that failed first or not, but they were pretty close as far as timing when they failed. 4+ inches of rain, and then all the runoff is heading down as well. Hell, we got 8+ inches of rain where I'm at in a 24 hour period. Thats absolutely insane.
Yeah, just last summer there was that standoff between the owners of the damn and the community or something. The lake was basically drained and just a small trickle in the center. It got resolved but nothing done to the damn in time for this. Problem was the damn had been in need of repairs for years and I believe was condemned. That was the reason for the standoff. Like you, I'm going by memory and what my uncle told me.
"The owners of the dam".
Jeebus.
I'm all for (mostly) open markets and entrepreneurialism but dams don't seem like the kind of things that should be privately owned. Basically, they are either a necessity or a public good (or both) and require maintenance. The idea that dam maintenance is negotiable as a cost offset and could be put off until the damn is condemned is really problematic and concerning.
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/watershed-moment-dam-removals-michigan
As an aside, I'm monitoring the flooding in Arenac County (having spent a lot of time in the metro Standish/Pinny areas) and that's also just unbelievable. White's Beach is unrecognizable.
Maybe we can hired some dam beavers. They use 100% organic materials, and their construction and maintenance waste is biodegradable.
4+ inches of rain over most of the middle of the state.
I'm in the Shields area, just west of Saginaw Township. I was able to get across the river to my home 5 minutes before the last bridge closed. We're housing an unexpected guest who was not able to return home because of it. We're far enough from the river that we should be safe unless everything comes up through the sump pump, but I have friends whose homes are already under.
Thankfully my house is 2 miles from the Tittabawassee River so we should be fine. But what a mess. Hopefully the bridges hold up. Tawas area is a mess also.
Originally from Midland.
This looks like it's going to be way worse than the '86 Flood, which was supposedly a "500 year Flood".
Family evacuated yesterday afternoon.
A similar situation happened here in Columbia Sc in October 2015. We had the “1000 year flood”. short of it is an unprecedented latter of moisture and weather pattern streamed rain from be SE to NW and dropped about 2 feet of rain in less than 48 hours.
A dam holding in a lake on the norther part of town had been breached, and eventually failed. That cascaded down the “creek” feeding several other lakes, and two or three of those also failed. There was massive flooding of homes within about a mile of the creek and just total disaster. They never re-dammed the lakes. They’re pretty much gone now, look like overgrown depressions in the land.
Also, the Broad river under the bridge over I-20 (the main East-west path across the city) was creating within a few inches of the top of the bridge and it was feared the bridge might go. Thankfully it didn’t, as that would have been catastrophic.
took about 3-4 years to get mostly back to normal.
This is so sad. I love downtown Midland - the H Hotel is one of my favorites anywhere, and the O2 Bar and Cafe Zinc were popular when I was working closely with Dow.
Year 2020 is not even half-way over yet, and most of us thought 2019 sucked bad enough. Unreal.