Michigan Dams Breached, Forcing Evacuation of Midland: Live Updates

Residents in nearby towns, including Edenville, Sanford and Midland, were evacuated.

Two dams in Central Michigan were breached by rain-swollen floodwaters on Tuesday, forcing the evacuation of thousands of residents and prompting officials to warn of life-threatening danger.

The failures of the Edenville Dam and the Sanford Dam, about 140 miles northwest of Detroit, led the National Weather Service to issue a flash-flood warning for areas near the Tittabawassee River, with downstream effects expected from Midland to Saginaw.

Residents in nearby towns, including Edenville, Sanford and Midland, were evacuated. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said at a news conference on Tuesday that downtown Midland, with a population of more than 41,000, could be under nine feet of water by Wednesday morning.

On Wednesday, the Weather Service said that the Tittabawassee River had reached 34.72 feet just before 9 a.m., a full 10 feet above flood levels, and that it was continuing to rise. The service said that life-threatening flooding along the river would continue during the day. Bridges across the river were closed and many roads were under water, Midland County officials said.

About 10,000 people were evacuating from Midland, and about 1,000 more residents in townships outside of the city were ordered to leave their homes, Bridgette Gransden, a Midland County spokeswoman, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

“More homes than that could have been affected,” she said.

Social distancing could be difficult for evacuees, the governor said.

While imploring residents to take the threat seriously and evacuate immediately, Ms. Whitmer said they should continue to observe precautions related to the coronavirus, including wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. She acknowledged that distancing would be difficult in shelters that had been set up in the area.

“To go through this in the midst of a global pandemic is almost unthinkable,” she said. “But we are here, and to the best of our ability we are going to navigate this together.”

In Sanford, a village of about 580 people in Midland County, water coursed through the streets, video from local news agencies showed. Some single-story structures were submerged nearly over doorways, and water had swept across a bridge over the Tittabawassee River, photos and video showed.

Midland County public schools were taking in people who had evacuated, including large crowds of older residents, the county’s superintendent of public schools, Michael Sharrow said on Twitter.

“Tough to see them go through this,” he wrote, posting photos of residents and supplies in a school gymnasium.

It was the second time in 24 hours that residents were told to evacuate. Four to seven inches of rain drenched the area on Sunday and Monday, according to the National Weather Service.

Regulators worried in 2018 that the Edenville Dam could not handle heavy flooding.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees hydroelectric dams, revoked the Edenville Dam’s license in 2018 because of a “longstanding failure to increase the project’s spillway capacity to safely pass flood flows,” among other issues.

The agency said it had been pressing the dam’s owner, Boyce Hydro Power, since 2004 to upgrade the dam so it could survive a “probable maximum flood event,” meaning the worst combination of bad weather and high runoff that could reasonably be expected. Without an upgrade, the agency’s engineers believed the dam could handle only about 50 percent of the floodwaters from such an event.

To comply, the dam would need either a bigger spillway or better protection against damage from overtopping, the agency said.

The dam, a set of earthen embankments about 6,600 feet long and up to 54.5 feet high, spanned two rivers, the Tittabawassee and the Tobacco. The reservoir behind the dam is known as Wixom Lake.

Like many states across the country, Michigan has a large number of deficient or aging dams. The state chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers said in a 2018 report that two-thirds of the state’s 2,600 dams were older than 50 years, the typical lifespan they are designed for. The report said that many were abandoned, poorly maintained or inadequately maintained. It said the state had 140 “high hazard” dams, with the potential to cause significant loss of life and property if they failed.

Dow Chemical Company is based in Midland.

Dow Chemical Company, based in Midland, has activated its emergency operations center and will be adjusting operations, Rachelle Schikorra, a spokeswoman, told The Associated Press.

Ms. Whitmer said on Tuesday night that thousands of people still needed to evacuate and that the scale of the disaster would not be known until late Wednesday morning.

“This is unlike anything we’ve ever seen before,” she said. “I feel like I’ve said that a lot over the last number of weeks. But this truly is a historic event that is playing out in the midst of another historic event.”

Trump tweeted support, after threatening to withhold funds from the state over voting by mail.

President Trump tweeted on Wednesday morning that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the military had been deployed to Michigan to assist with disaster response. But he also used the occasion to repeat his criticism of Governor Whitmer for not lifting coronavirus restrictions faster.

The message came after Mr. Trump incorrectly accused Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state of mailing ballots to all of the state’s registered voters. In that message earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Trump threatened to withhold unspecified federal funds from Michigan if the state proceeded to expand vote-by-mail efforts. He made a similar threat against Nevada.

The Twitter post on voting was the latest in a series of broadsides the president has aimed at the vote-by-mail process, which has become the primary vehicle for voting in an electoral system transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Trump has claimed, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that voting by mail is rife with fraud.

Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, announced on Tuesday that her office would send absentee ballot applications — and not actual ballots, as the president claimed — to all of the state’s voters, as election officials elsewhere have done during the health crisis.

Daniel Victor, Christine Hauser, Steven Moity, Alex Lemonides and Patrick J. Lyons contributed reporting.