I dunno, man. I have seen far more "100 year" and "500 year" events happen in my 25-year adulthood than seems statistically possible. Someone on Twitter pointed out that the average dam in the United States is 52 years old. Edenville is 95. This is gonna be on Trump. The dam used to be privately owned and operated by Boyce Hydro Power, a company based in Edenville, which also used to own three other hydroelectric facilities on the Tittabawassee: the Secord, Smallwood, and Sanford Dams. In a rarely used federal power, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) terminated Boyce Hydro Power's license in 2018, because of its "inability to pass the Probable Maximum Flood (PMF)", as well as seven other failures. The federal government was concerned that "the dam may not have the ability to pass enough water, if a severe flood were to hit, among other issues and violations." The Four Lakes Task Force purchased the Edenville Dam and its reservoir, Lake Wixom, as well as three other dams, in 2019 for $9.5 million.“While the 1986 flood was a 100-year flood, what we’re looking at here is an event that is the equivalent of a 500-year flood,” he told MLive. “It’s something that is extremely rare, extremely catastrophic, and quite dangerous.”
The dam was built by Frank Isaac Wixom, after whom the reservoir formed by the dam is named.[6] Wixom used to own a circus before he built the dam.
Michigan, the state that The Detroit Free Press today reminded was won in 2016 by “Señor The States-will-take-the-blame” by less than two tenths of a percent of votes cast. This was in an article about our SOS, Jocelyn Benson, affirming that all registered Michigan voters will be mailed an absentee ballot this fall. I cannot believe the Trump will take that news too well. I’m interested to see his backtracking attempt to denounce a state taking fair voting into it’s own hands not long after also expecting them to survive the coronavirus on their own.
One of the basic arguments of Cadillac Desert is that we view dams as eternal when in fact they are ephemeral. Complicating that, the inspections necessary and the staff available to perform them means that in general, someone coming by every couple of years and going "yep, that's a dam" is about where we're at, and have been since the 1910s. So when someone actually gets their act together enough to go "holy shit this thing is a deathtrap" it's been a deathtrap for decades.