“We were sitting at the table having dinner when my phone buzzed,” the homeowner told me. “It was an evacuation alert. By the time I finished reading it, garage doors were opening up and down the street as our neighbors grabbed what they could and tore out of here.”
Thirty miles away, the Edenville Dam had just failed spectacularly, swelling the Tittabawassee River and sending floodwaters cascading toward Midland, Michigan, the corporate home of Dow Chemicals. The hydroelectric power company that owned the dam, built in 1924, had its license pulled in 2018 by the federal government due to doubts over its structural integrity. The state, however, inspected the dam—ten years older than the WPA—and deemed it sound. The dam operators twice lowered water levels in the months following license revocation, citing safety concerns. They brought the levels back to normal after the state filed a lawsuit in late April in defense of freshwater mussels endangered by the low water level.
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