Signs of recovery build in Sanford one year after Edenville Dam collapse

Neal Rubin
The Detroit News

Sanford — The houses are never coming back, and that's sad. But the grass and the plans are taking root, and that's progress.

The neighborhood was known by its location, south of the Rail Trail. Dolores Porte, president of the Village of Sanford, was walking the perimeter last week.

"Neil and Dawn Hock, they lived there," she said. She pointed to another spot where a home once stood and the crush of water left not even a wall behind: "On this corner, that was Jim and Pat Perry."

The flood that swept away the dozen houses and so much more came a year ago Wednesday. When life hands you millions of gallons of water, make lemonade: Now the 10 acres are a park, a nubby lawn ringed by license-plate-sized "Keep off the grass" signs that   looked bigger online. 

Maybe the expanse will eventually hold an outdoor ice rink. Maybe it will welcome food trucks and concerts and picnics.

Rising from emptiness, it's a bit like Sanford — full of possibilities, even when it's obvious what's missing.

Last May 19, as the nation was taking its early steps through the COVID-19 pandemic, days of rain and years of neglect combined to overwhelm the Edenville Dam 10 miles upstream. A torrent cascaded south from Wixom Lake, swept through Sanford Lake and emptied both of them as it surged around the Sanford Dam to the Tittabawassee River.

What’s left of Sanford Lake behind Sanford village president Dolores Porte’s backyard has not regained its former glory a year after the Edenville Dam failure emptied the lake.

Porte, a retired global accounts payable manager for Dow Chemical, can do the math for you: Two lakes into one river equals chaos.

Floodwaters thundered 6 miles onward, leaving 9 feet of water in downtown Midland. Sanford's tiny business district was decimated.

In the aftermath, a chronic shortage of affordable housing in Midland County has grown even more acute. Contractors are swamped. Across the nation, the cost of building supplies has gone through the roof, devouring payouts to local homeowners from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

If there's a silver lining in the clouds that dumped the rain that started it all, home values along the lakes haven't fallen as much as expected. Among the hidden pitfalls are the emptied aquifers that render some residents' wells drier than the lake beds.

“It’s like the perfect storm of how can we make this process as painful as possible,” Sanford real estate agent Teresa Quintana said.

Yet as she can quantify, the village of 791 people has been awash in concern and benevolence from both inside and far outside its borders.

She co-founded a Facebook group called Sanford Strong that became an information clearinghouse, a rallying point with 12,000 members and finally, with Quintana vaulting through hoops, a 501(c)(3).

"People have been generous with their time, generous with their skills, generous with their money," she said. "At one point, I was dispatching so many volunteers that I said, 'Just drive around. You'll find people that need you.'"

Two weeks ago, she was one of the speakers as the United Way of Midland County and the county's Habitat for Humanity chapter celebrated the completion of a new home for Chris Billings and his three daughters. At one point after the flood, they were living in a fifth-wheel trailer mounted on a wooden platform near the empty space where their house had been.

It truly has taken a village. Employees and volunteers worked side by side to stock shelves and create a milestone, the opening last Thursday of a rebuilt Sanford Hardware on its once-muddy footprint. Some of the same people had shown up the morning after the flood, masked and unasked.

Allstate Sign Co. owner Mike Denoyer revamps the Welcome to Sanford sign, adding to it a new clock and LED lighting, a year after the village was flooded.

A four-day commemoration of the flood's anniversary begins Wednesday with a short walk from the dam to the Sanford Veterans Monument, destroyed but then remade four times larger. The series of events is called Sanford Rising, and organizers are emphasizing it's not a celebration, even if it encompasses music, a cornhole tournament and an ice cream social.

Friday's activities will include a 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. car show at the park where Porte was pointing to things that aren't there anymore.

Back there, she said, was where Kathy Parson's home wound up after it was wrenched from its foundation. Buried somewhere inside was an urn holding her mother's ashes, so she spray-painted a plea on the side of the house — "Don't take this away." The urn turned up in a bedroom, caked with mud.

Until last month, the park was known simply as "the unnamed park." Then, to Porte's surprise, the village council voted to name it after her.

She was honored, she said, if also hesitant, because like everyone else in town she's thinking ahead.

"What if 30 years from now," she asked, "people don't like me anymore?"

Numbers and stories

Numbers tell much of the story of the disaster and the aftermath. Storytellers tell it, too.

Perhaps the most surprising figure: Zero fatalities or serious injuries, thanks largely to first responders who went door-to-door ordering an evacuation.

A staggering figure: 3.7 million pounds of debris, piled 30 feet high against Sanford Dam. Trees, sheds, docks, pontoons, dreams.

Private losses from Edenville to Midland hit $200 million, according to the state. Public streets and buildings took a $34 million pounding. The tally of homes destroyed hit 150, with damage to 790 others.

A year ago, floodwaters left Sanford’s tiny business district decimated.

The president and CEO of United Way of Midland County owns one of only eight houses in her Midland neighborhood that didn’t catch water, at least in the basement.

“Seeing streets lined with the contents of people’s homes … it’s heart-wrenching,” Holly Miller said.

FEMA data shows 915 reported claims in her city, Miller said, compared to 333 in Sanford. But Midland has 42,000 people, vastly more than the 4,700 in Jerome Township, which includes the village and the lake.

“In the city of Midland, it impacted homes and infrastructure,” she said. “In the lakes district, it changed the whole environment.”

Miller said her agency has raised more than $4 million in donations, and focused as well on basic needs — food and water, yes, but also things like laundry vouchers, because a flood is like a fire in that “everything you have is gone.”

“People were bringing in semi-loads of fill-in-the-blank,” she said. “We passed out the generosity of an entire nation.”

The nation has acquired fresh problems since what's been called a 500-year flood. The Carolinas had hurricanes. Texas had ice.

Flood victims and the people like Miller who assist them worry the need will be forgotten before the cleanup is complete. But helping hands continue to lift and shovel.

The United Way has logged more than 27,000 hours from 5,681 volunteers — and it’s impossible to calculate the amount of labor that never signed in.

At Red Oak Family Restaurant on downtown Sanford's main street, West Saginaw Road, Melissa Ayotte oversees the front of the house while her father runs the kitchen.

"I walked in the day after the flood," she said, "and walked right out."

That was a Wednesday.

The surge had created a modest waterfall where none had existed before, through the partially collapsed south abutment of the dam. Local legends were being created as well — the man who ignored the evacuation order and watched the water rearrange his chairs as he stood on his kitchen table, or the playhouse that moved 300 feet north while the slide that descended from it went south.

Ayotte couldn't face any of it. Then on Thursday, "people just showed up with trucks and dump trailers and starting hauling stuff out."

The watermark was 7 ½ feet high, 4 inches below the drop ceiling. The sludge on the floor was 4 inches thick. The only things from the old dining room still hanging in the refurbished one are sketches of Ayotte's dad and grandpa and the Bud Light mirror behind the bar.

Like the hardware store, the Red Oak is more than what it sells. Before, it was a dinner spot, open from 4 p.m. onward. Now the two other major restaurants on West Saginaw have given up and moved to Midland, and the Ayottes are learning how to serve breakfast and lunch.

"We'd just paid off the building in December (2019)," she said. Their new loan is $240,000. With an additional boost from a $200,000 grant and $50,000 her dad won't be spending on retirement, they were able to reopen six weeks ago.

Ayotte had been scheduled to close the week after the flood on a house along Sanford Lake, where the formerly inviting view features a muddy expanse carpeted by native grasses and rapidly sprouting poplar trees.

The timing was "a blessing in disguise," she said with a soft laugh, "even if I had to live with my dad for a year."

Travis Carter fishes below the dry Sanford Dam last week. Private losses after the flooding hit $200 million, according to the state. Public streets and buildings took a $34 million pounding.

A block and a half from the restaurant, Mike Ellis wanted to walk away. His daughter stood her ground.

He bought what's now a Marathon gas station and liquor store 36 years ago. At 75, he's mostly retired.

Heather Ellis, 46, has a livelihood to think about and a 15-year-old son who might someday want the business, too. So Ellis Party Store lives on, even if "on a scale of 1 to 10, there was nothing salvageable."

Everything within the walls of the store and the four storage and generator buildings behind it was trash. The structures had to be gutted to the studs. The five two-sided gas pumps and the solo dispenser for ethanol-free fuel all had to be replaced.

"We power-washed for days and days and days to get the mud out," Heather Ellis said. "We dried it with fans for weeks to keep it from getting moldy."

Friends helped. Strangers helped. Expertise helped: A guy she knows left a front-end loader out front one day, and she hopped in and put it to work.

What didn't help was her insurance company, even as she spent $1 million on inventory and restoration.

"Not one dollar," she said. "The flood, the dam break, the sewer backup. We got absolutely nothing. That's probably the worst part of this."

It's a common refrain. Residents have posted signs on their property, damning their insurance carriers by name. A car in a flooded garage might have been covered. An overwhelmed sump pump might have been worth a few dollars. But no one on Sanford Strong is gushing about being made whole by their dear insurer.

The party store and station reopened on March 11. The shelving, however, ordered in January, didn't arrive until two weeks ago. The pandemic shut down the shelf factory, and what can you do?

Sell merchandise off tabletops, is what. Sanford Adaptable.

Small town, big hearts

Dennis Sian's Sanford Hardware had reopened quickly in a buddy's woodworking shop — only 3,000 square feet instead of 10,000, but it was dry and the electricity worked.

"Here's your keys," said the friend, Mike Rudy. "I gotta go out of town."

That's a small town, said Sian's wife, Kathy. That's big hearts.

Kendra Melchi, right, a long-time employee of Sanford Hardware, works to prepare the store for reopening soon. It has been closed since the flooding raged through the town.

Kathy had an orange bandage at the tip of her right thumb. It was a kitchen mishap, she said, not a hardware accident; she's been cooking lunch every day for the shelf-stockers at the new store. That day it was chili.

Her sister-in-law, Laura Sian, said it was good chili. She also said she had to leave: "The ladies are playing cards down at the American Legion."

Behind the store and across a side street, Steven and Kara Lang were measuring the exterior of a little white house surrounded by fencing pushed inward by walls of water. He was bending a tape measure around the right angles of the windows and she was taking down the numbers as he called them out.

Their Langs Home Services company was bidding on a siding job. A year after the water receded, it was one of seven estimates they would do in an afternoon.

"There's lots and lots of cleanup," Kara explained, "before you can get to some of these houses."

Steve, tall and lean, cut trees for a living until he needed back surgery. Next, he worked in a sawmill for three months and lost two fingers, “so I got out of that.”

Post-flood, he’s been doing lots of sub-floors and drywall work. “And lots of decks,” he said, “because decks got taken away.”

His big problem now is the availability of wood and related supplies, and then the cost if he can find what he needs. The pandemic slowed manufacturing at the same time homeowners were spending time gazing at the flaws in their houses and deciding it was time to act.

“What used to be a $900 deck is three grand for materials,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. There’ve been a couple of jobs we’ve practically done for nothing because we didn’t pay attention to how fast prices were going up.”

The one place prices are going down is the real estate market, at least for houses near the lakes.

Quintana says the agency she’s with took a $599,000 listing on upscale North Little Canal Drive a few weeks before the dam failure.

Some houses on that block were so badly damaged they’ve been bulldozed. This one was pummeled and still sold for $335,000, with repairs the responsibility of the new owner and the lake still a mirage.

“A 25% reduction has kind of been the baseline,” she said.

It helps that there are now estimated dates for lake renewals — 2025 for Sanford, 2026 for Wixom. It also helps that the Four Lakes Task Force’s estimated cost of dam repairs has dropped from $338 million to $215 million, putting the proposed 40-year annual assessments for lakefront homeowners at considerably less than the original worst-case estimate of $4,000.

Most of all, it helps that housing is hard to come by. When homeowners become renters as their houses are rehabilitated, it strains the market even further.

“I have 29 buyers ready to go, and we sit there and wait for houses to come on the market,” Quintana said. “It’s harder to get sellers because people don’t want to leave until they have a place ready to go to.”

Were it up to Marty Wissmueller, she'd have one more listing.

He's putting a garden where the pond used to be in his backyard on North Little Canal before the aquifer emptied. He's preparing to spend a second summer gazing mournfully at the place he used to swim, sail or kayak every passably warm day.

Wissmueller recently had his house appraised and the number was about what Quintana would have predicted, 25% below peak. He'd sell anyway, but his wife won't go.

His neighbor, he said, is in the opposite position. His wife wants to find a lake home with an actual waterfront while she's young enough to enjoy it. The husband wants to stay put. 

A possible solution presents itself, "but I've been married almost 53 years," Wissmueller said. "It's too late to switch now."

Instead, he'll wait, watching the wild grass grow and longing for the water, like Sanford, to rise again.

nrubin@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @nealrubin_dn