Aging hazard dams forced a reckoning in Michigan this year
Updated Dec 30, 2020;
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LANSING, MI — They say you shouldn’t let a crisis go to waste.
Well, there’s been a few of those in 2020. In Michigan, it was also the year aging hazard dams forced a long-overdue reckoning among state regulators.
This fall, a group of experts in river ecology, civil engineering, dam safety and other aspects of environmental and energy policy have taken the crisis maxim to heart as they flyspeck the regulatory structure around an overlooked and under-funded area of the state’s water infrastructure.
The goal is to overhaul the state’s dam safety and regulatory protocols, and hopefully avoid another catastrophe like the one on May 18 in Edenville, when a decrepit hydroelectric dam collapsed and unleashed a 500-year flood that displaced 10,000 people during a pandemic and caused about $200 million worth of damage in three counties.