Bozzlife: Disaster close to home
This is a very different post than I was planning on writing today. You might recall back in October our basement flooded during a pretty heavy but short rain storm. It was an mechanical failure isolated to our sump pump and only impacted our house.
In contrast, as you can see in the video above, something much more catastrophic is happening in my hometown which we live just a short distance away from now.
Over the past couple of days, we got an average of about four inches of rain. The ground is already saturated due to it being Spring time and there was simply no where for the water to go.
You can see how it impacted our neighborhood in this post I wrote yesterday.
When I was a kid, we had a flood in 1986. It was the biggest thing I have ever seen in real life. The bridge at the end of my parents road was washed out and instead of the usual three or four routes we had into town, we were left with only one way in or out.
It took a significant amount of time to recover from that flood in 1986.
The river crested at ~33 feet during the flood of '86. With this flood they are expecting the river to crest at 38 feet. A full four to five feet higher than the previous record. They fully expect downtown Midland to be under nine feet of water when all is said and done.
The Tittabawassee river as you can see in the map is pretty vast. It actually joins with several other rivers and changes its name once or twice by the time it reaches the Saginaw Bay. At some point in time they thought it would be a good idea to dam it a upstream at Edenville to create Wixom lake and Sanford to create Sanford lake.
Basically, a dam up river from Wixom lake failed which caused more water than the dam in Edenville could handle. It was a chain reaction from there on out. Midland which would probably be considered a small town if it wasn't for Dow Corning and Dow Chemical was force to evacuate basically half of their population.
My parents live out near the Pine River and they are safe but basically cut off from town and us for the time being. Every bridge over the Tittabawassee river has either been shut down or collapsed.
This final video focuses on the area near one of my favorite disc golf courses. That brown wooden thing is called the Tridge. It is a three span bridge that connects three sections where the Chippewa and the Tittabawassee river come together. The green circle is the canopy for our local farmers market. I have countless friends who have been forced to evacuate their homes.
I can't even wrap my head around what recovery is going to look like at this point in time.
I want to give a special shout out to @bigtom13, I know he has written several posts about the damming of rivers down where he lives and I think he will find this interesting.
The good news... @mrsbozz and I are safe, our families are safe, and we are so very thankful for that!
all videos were taken from Youtube
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
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I'm so glad you are safe, what a disaster! Hope your parents have enough supplies to last, sounds like it may be awhile before travel is restored. As if people didn't have enough to deal with already, with coronavirus. And it also sounds like this could have been avoided since there was knowledge since 2018 that the dam was not sound.
Yes, it is all very concerning. With everyone evacuating to specific locations it is going to be interesting to see if that increases the spread.