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Mar 12, 2018 · The photo was taken March 17, 1928, nearly a week after the dam's collapse. 4/22. Jonathan Lloyd/KNBC-TV A view of San Francisquito Canyon, site of the March 1928 St. Francis Dam collapse. the dam ...
- Overview
- ‘There's a big gap’
- ‘A gifted life for a poor boy’
- ‘Enforcement is the issue’
- What’s next
SANFORD, Michigan — When the first dam collapsed, a massive surge of water roared so swiftly into Mike Gorthy’s lakefront home that he returned from securing his boats outside to discover water above the light switches on his first floor.
He hurried to cut the power, then went frantically searching for his wife, who had been downstairs.
“I was looking around in the water and felt under the water and I just couldn't find her,” said Gorthy, 75, who waded through the bitterly cold, neck-high flood, dodging a refrigerator and a freezer that were floating on their sides. “I thought maybe she got electrocuted and was under the water and if I found her, I’d try to revive her.”
When the water got too cold for him to bear, he retreated upstairs, despondent. “I thought I’d lost her,” he said.
In fact, Gorthy’s wife, Judy, 72, had safely escaped the house, which is built into a hill and has its front door on the second floor. Her husband soon found her on the dry front yard talking to a neighbor — perhaps the most joyous moment of his life, he said. But the lakefront dream home the Gorthys bought when they retired 20 years ago was ravaged.
By the end of the day, it wasn’t even on a lake.
As the people of Midland and its surrounding areas clean up the damage, they’re facing difficult questions that could presage similar discussions experts say need to take place around the country.
Among them: Who should own dams? Who should pay for their repairs? And, in many places: Should they exist at all?
There are more than 90,000 dams in the United States, according to a federal inventory. Among them, more than 15,000 are considered high-hazard dams, meaning they’re close enough to populated areas that life or property could be threatened if they fail.
Of those high-hazard dams, more than 2,300 have been so poorly maintained they’re in unsatisfactory condition, said Mark Ogden, project manager at the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.
And many dam owners — 64 percent of whom are private entities — don’t have the money to make repairs, he said. “There’s a big gap between what’s needed and the actual resources.”
The dam safety organization has documented 250 dam failures since 2010, plus more than 500 other incidents that were caught and fixed just ahead of a failure. Most were small and had limited impact, but some were catastrophic, including a dam break in Nebraska last year that killed a man when it washed away his house.
Wixom and Sanford lakes, which were created by the Edenville and Sanford dams in the 1920s, have existed as long as anyone in the Midland area can remember.
Daniel Lackey, 70, was just 5 when his father scraped together savings from his job at a General Motors plant in Flint to buy a small cottage with cement floors on Wixom Lake — a basic retreat that lacked indoor plumbing for years.
He spent his childhood summers fishing, playing badminton and jumping from the diving board that he and his brothers crafted at the end of their dock.
“It was a gifted life for a poor boy,” Lackey said, recalling the summer he skipped driver’s ed to build a hydroplane with his brother from plans the two found in a magazine.
He brought his wife, Kayann, there for the first time when she was 17 and he was home on leave from the U.S. Air Force. Their children and nieces and nephews grew up there, and now bring their own children and grandchildren — the cottage’s fourth and fifth generations.
Lackey and wife moved to the lake full time after he retired from General Motors and Kayann, now 67, retired from her work as a Montessori preschool director.
Most American dams were built in the 20th century to serve mills or factories that are long gone, Graber of American Rivers said.
In most of the country, it’s difficult to make money generating hydroelectricity since turning a profit typically requires the force of a large river as it makes a steep drop. Small dams in flat states like Michigan have thin margins at best, Graber said.
“Many, perhaps most, of the dams in the United States are no longer serving the purpose they were built to provide,” he said. “A very high percentage should be removed for health and safety reasons, as well as environmental benefits.”
Graber, whose organization works to remove dams, said restoring a river to its natural state can improve public safety and water quality, allowing fish to migrate freely. He says homeowners like the Lackeys and the Gorthys will soon see grass growing on their lake bed and might come to enjoy living beside a verdant meadow with a river running through it.
The river in its natural state would also be less likely to flood downstream in Midland, he said.
But Sanford and Wixom lakes are deeply intertwined with the economy of the region. Lakefront property owners pay high taxes that the region depends on, and local businesses have long catered to boaters.
No one knows how much it will cost to rebuild the dams, but it’s definitely going to be expensive — and it’s not clear who would cover the cost.
Many homeowners on the lake say they want to get the dams out of Mueller’s hands.
“When you have a private person owning something like a dam and trying to own it for the sake of his own profits, then you end up with bad decisions,” Schulz, Lackey’s daughter, said. “This was not a natural disaster. This was a dam that was neglected and it failed. This was a man-made disaster.”
If homeowners want the dams out of Mueller’s hands, however, they’ll have to buy them, Kogan said. His client has no intention of just giving them away and losing his investment.
U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., who represents the area, said the two lakes “are a tremendous resource for the region” and need to be restored, whether that means raising money from private corporations or from a public-private partnership.
"We’re going to have an all-hands-on-deck approach to look at a variety of options and work together to solve this,” he said.
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Sep 30, 2019 · As the dam was filled up between 1926 and 1928, this unstable hillside became saturated with water, causing a massive landslide on the evening of March 12, 1928. The collapse occurred just five days after the dam was filled for the first time to near capacity on March 7. Causes of the Collapse According to Rogers
At 3 minutes before midnight on March 12, 1928, the dam collapsed catastrophically and without warning. The center section of the dam, soon to be called the “tombstone” and the wing visible to the right were all that remained in place. The wing was 588’ long and 20’ tall.
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Sep 15, 2023 · A 2021 U.N. report co-authored by Perera assessed more than 50,000 large dams around the world. He and his co-researchers found that many countries’ dams are, on average, older than age 50 and ...
