On a rainy February night in 2018, the fire marshal knocked on Jonathan Korbecki's door on Michigan's Thornapple River to warn that the nearby LaBarge Dam might fail and send a wall of water toward his home. Hundreds of yards of trucked-in sand held the high-hazard structure that night. Eight years on, a Bridge Michigan investigation distributed Monday by The Associated Press reports that federal records still describe seepage through LaBarge's embankment, a spillway too small to pass a major flood, and flow-control gates in "deteriorated condition," per an April 27 report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission [1]. "Why should you be allowed to own a dam if you can't maintain it?" Korbecki asked.
He is one of more than 100,000 Michiganders living downstream of potentially hazardous dams, and the investigation's central finding is that the figure is almost certainly too low [1]. The 100,000 count comes from a study of 219 state-regulated dams and excludes roughly 60 federally regulated ones, including some of the state's largest; federal officials would not supply figures for those. Of 153 high-hazard dams in state and federal databases, 19 sit in poor or unsatisfactory condition, as do 23 of 155 significant-hazard dams. Another 231 would likely fail if Michigan aligned its standards with national guidance [1].
That standards gap is the story's quiet engine. Most high-hazard dams Michigan regulates need only survive a once-in-200-year flood; many other states and the federal government require structures whose failure could kill people to withstand the "probable maximum flood," the worst conceivable in the area [1]. "A piece of infrastructure that can kill people should be designed to withstand a flood that's very, very infrequent," state dam-safety chief Luke Trumble said. Michigan's 2,600 dams now average three decades past their 50-year design life while storms intensify.
Money, not engineering, is where the risk compounds. Private parties own roughly three-quarters of Michigan's dams, and the National Association of State Dam Safety Officials last year put the statewide repair bill at $1 billion [1]. The state has already drained a $50 million repair-and-removal fund. When deferred maintenance becomes crisis, taxpayers inherit it: Trumble says that by then "you can pretty much add another zero" to the cost. This spring's floods proved the point, triggering failures and near-misses across the state. At the Cheboygan Dam alone, the state spent more than $5 million to avert disaster, and it is unclear whether it will recoup a dollar.
Collapse footage casts dam safety as an episode: a wall of water, a rescue, a receding crisis. The danger actually lives in the interval between disasters, where a FERC disclosure exemption lets owners such as LaBarge's Commonwealth Power Co. shield safety records. Commonwealth's CEO, Dwight Bowler, said the dam is "fully capable" of passing a 500-year flood and that "significant upgrades" are planned, but declined to share specifics, citing that exemption [1]. FERC spokesperson Celeste Miller would not say whether downstream residents can consider LaBarge safe in the meantime. That unanswered question is the one residents are left holding.
The pattern repeats across owners who cannot pay. The AuTrain Dam's owners declared bankruptcy after years of ignoring FERC's ordered fixes, leaving the century-old high-hazard structure to the state. Last month a judge recommended denying Consumers Energy's plan to sell 13 aging dams to a private-equity firm, concluding the deal failed to guarantee upkeep. Cindy Atkinson lives downstream of three of them on the Muskegon River, where one analysis found a 52-foot wall of water would swallow her home if the Hardy Dam failed. "We're at their mercy," she said [1]. In Antrim County, the Elk Rapids Dam has spillway cracks wide enough to fit a hand, and splitting $13 million in repairs among 7,000 waterfront landowners has stalled for want of cross-county signoffs. "Every day we kick the can down the road, we kick the price up," dam operator Leslie Meyers said.
Michigan has seen the endpoint. The 2020 Edenville and Sanford failures near Midland forced more than 10,000 to evacuate and caused more than $200 million in damage; FERC had warned for decades before passing the problem to a state that lacked the hidden records to judge the risk [1]. Bills to raise standards, compel FERC transparency, and fund repairs cleared both chambers last week alongside a budget deal, though months of negotiation remain over whether the money suffices. Thomas Perrin, who lost his Sanford home in 2020 and still panics at the sound of a sump pump, framed the stakes plainly: "Our infrastructure needs to be repaired, and it needs to happen yesterday."
-- DARA OSEI, London