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The owner of the dam was free not to repair it; now the residents of the city are free to deal with this.
We don’t know much about Lee Mueller yet, but there is much we can reasonably surmise. He is most assuredly a property-rights guy (as in “it’s my property and I’ll do with it whatever I want”), and I’d bet that he’s a second-amendment-rights guy and I’d be surprised if he wears an anti-coronavirus mask in public. Mr. Mueller is identified as “a manager” of, and has been for several days the only spokesman for, Boyce Hydro Power LLC, a free American company operated by free Americans in Michigan, in the land of the free.
We know more about Boyce Hydro than we do about Mr. Mueller, because Boyce has for decades been stonewalling the federal government and the government of Michigan as regulators tried to get the company to maintain and repair the four small hydropower dams it owned on the Tittabawassee River. The most problematic of them was the Edenville Dam, a mile-and-a-quarter-long, 54-foot-high earthen dam built in 1924 to form the 2,000-acre Wixom Lake. But the owners of Edenville Dam were free Americans, free to ignore their tyrannical government’s orders to keep their dam safe.
After years of struggle with Boyce Power over Edenville Dam, in 2018 the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission did something it almost never does — it gave up. Citing eight dam “failures,” one of them being that it would probably collapse in a major flood, FERC pulled Boyce Hydro’s license to generate power at Edenville and handed oversight over to the state of Michigan. Now without income from the dam, Boyce Hydro not only continued to refuse to make necessary repairs and improvements, but started screwing around with the levels of the lake. Property owners along its 84 miles of shoreline went nuts.
In desperation, the counties adjoining the lake set up an authority, obtained $5 million from the state, and negotiated a purchase of all four Boyce Hydro dams. It was scheduled to close early in 2022.
Too late.
At 6:45 pm on Tuesday, May 19, after 8 inches of rain had fallen in about 24 hours, the Edenville Dam failed. Water cascading through the breach overwhelmed the Sandford Dam downstream an hour later.
About 10,000 of the 40,000 residents of the city of Midland, downstream from the Sandford Dam, were ordered by their tyrannical government to evacuate homes that were a few minutes away from being submerged under up to nine feet of water. The city set up three shelters, two of which were promptly cut off by high water. But residents were free to crowd into the third, and there was no time for enforcing the tyrannical rules about social distancing or masks, so they were also free to pick up the coronavirus before they returned to their sodden homes to begin the business of recovery.
Lee Mueller of Boyce Hydro is unapologetic. It’s the government’s fault, he says, they pressured him to keep the lake levels too high for safety. No one in government seems to know what he’s talking about.
There are two things about this story that I hate. One is the sense of entitlement on the part of the owners and operators of that damn dam, their claim to have a right to endanger thousands of people while making money, without a shadow of responsibility to do anything, even when the danger is vividly described to them. People like this own thousands of decrepit dams across the country (and coal mines and factory farms and refineries etc. etc.). These people are currently being encouraged, even cheered on, by the president of the United States, whose own sense of entitlement dwarfs the known universe. There is a term of law that should — but probably never will — apply to them: reckless endangerment.
But the other thing that I hate just as much is the failure of the government, at every level, to deal with this obvious and growing threat to the people of Midland before they were done irreparable harm. Do you know what you call a country that cannot enforce the law, that cannot keep its citizens safe, even from well-known and -understood threats like a virus, or a gang of gun-toting whack jobs declaring their right to intimidate the majority of people, or a dam that’s about to fail?
You call it a failed state.
I’d call it a “shithole country.” God dam.
Failed state. Bingo. Thank you for your excellent posts.
Maybe it’s time to introduce Mr Mueller to Mr Lynch.
It’s so nice to know that Boyce Hydro Power was a limited liability corporation. /s
Absolutely nuts.
China has their own infrastructure bank. It’s sorta like a Fed for building sh*t.
China refuses to hop on board the neo-liberal train bound for nowhere, and that fascinates the hell out of me.
Hydroelectric dams are one thing, nuclear reactors a far worse one. There are currently 450 fully operational reactors all over the world, all waiting to go full Fukushima.
http://energyskeptic.com/2020/nuclear-waste-will-last-much-longer-than-climate-change/
Failed state? No. Failed world? Yes.
The O3 molecule is sooo delicate, and the idea that post-collapse, the Ozone Layer will somehow survive the inevitable release of 250,000 tons of radioactive material strikes me as tad naive.
Then again, maybe I’m the naive one; maybe the Ozone Layer truly is invincible.
Creeping Corporatism – the progressive relinquishing of the power of representative government to corporate interests – is starkly evident in the Michigan dam failures. Critical infrastructure must never be controlled by non-governmental entities – entities which place the interests of their stockholders ahead of those of the people….(I know, I know, “corporations are people too.”)
But there is, I believe, a larger problem here. America is simply to sprawling and diverse to be manageable by even the best of governments. It’s time to divide the country into regional nations – each of a more geographically compact and popularly homogeneous nature. In fact, independence movements have already attained a degree of momentum in Texas, Alaska, Colorado and California. The Northeastern States would certainly be better off as an independent nation. And of course, as I’ve been told since childhood, “The South shall rise again!”…Let’s let ’em!
“…for the sentiments of the East were very different than those of the West.” – Edward Gibbon, ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’