The Failure of Edenville Dam and the Cascade Failure of Sanford Dam

It has been a while since the dams in Michigan failed, affecting a lot of Michigan, and destroying a lot of homes and businesses. It was May 19, 2020, at 5:46 p.m. due to flooding from a large rain storm, a portion of the earthen embankment underwent static liquefaction. I hadn't heard of that before this incident. Liquefaction is not uncommon after an earthquake - there are some amazing/horrifying videos out there if you look. As the name implies, what was solid ground suddenly starts behaving like a liquid. As you can imagine this is bad news for the things built on top of that dirt, or built out of dirt, like an earthen embankment dam. All of which is explained in the video below.

One of the things that has been noted, and is mentioned again in the video, is that the people who mostly enjoy the benefits of these old dams, the people who own property around the man-made lakes, are not the people paying for their upkeep. Not usually. There have been a couple of instances where the property owners upstream have accepted financial responsibility for the dams, but usually only for rebuilding after a disaster. At least those are the instances I've seen. In some cases the dams are owned and maintained by municipalities, but that is not usually the case for these old hydroelectric dams.

After the license to generate power for the Edenville dam was revoked by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), there was a project underway to transfer ownership to a local governmental agency so that tax dollars could be used to maintain the dams and the lakes. That was supposed to transfer ownership in 2022.

This is the Practical Engineering video What Really Happened At Edenville and Sanford Dams?

And as I have mentioned before, we need to do a better job of maintaining these dams, or mitigating the potential problems. This is an extreme case. And is was made worse by the fact that the Michigan department in charge of environmental protection wouldn't let the dam owner drain the lake to preserve some habitat created when the dam was built, and to protect some species of muscle or snail or whatever. So, how'd that work out?