By Lily Cole
Residents of Midland County, Michigan, who were affected by the disastrous Edenville flood are still feeling the effects six years later.
On May 19, 2020, after heavy rainfall caused heavy inflow and rising water levels, the Edenville dam failed.
Water surging from the Tittabawassee and Tobacco rivers ripped homes from their foundations and washed out bridges, eventually reaching the Sanford Dam, which breached, flooding downtown Midland and forcing 10,000 people to evacuate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Houses haven’t been fully rebuilt. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) bought some and turned them into parks, and debris is still scattered around impacted areas, 75-year-old retiree Marlene Nelson said.
“No one will remove [piled up] sand on the lake,” Nelson said. “People do it themselves.”
Jill Hurley, a 53-year-old resident, whose family bought a lakefront home, said the situation is frustrating.
“Our taxes never went down. We still have to pay the same. And now they’re going up, and now we have another tax added on to that for 40 years — a $40,000 tax to rebuild the dams,” she said.
Currently, the Edenville Dam is undergoing a $143 million rehabilitation and reconstruction project, with full completion expected in September 2027, according to Four Lakes Task Force, a nonprofit organization led by lake residents and industry professionals that serves as the delegated authority for Midland and Gladwin counties.
The project totals $350 to $400 million for the Edenville, Sanford, Secord and Smallwood restorations.
Sanford Councilmember Carl Hamann said living in Midland will never be the same.
“It will never be normal,” he said, adding that everyone who stayed and continues to go through it has changed.
On April 23, a class action lawsuit filed by Midland County residents against the state was dismissed.
The state still took legal action in federal court and won, showing that the dam owners broke the law and that the catastrophe was triggered by an unprecedented 100-year flood rather than by government negligence.
In 2023, a judge ordered Lee Mueller, who was in charge of the dam, to pay nearly $120 million for his role in the failure. The court found he didn’t tell the state how vulnerable the dam was, and that his company, Boyce Hydro, never installed a safety feature that could have likely prevented the disaster.
For 76-year-old retiree Mike Marker, who lives half a mile south of the Edenville Dam, the responsibility for regulating dams rests with the state of Michigan, to his understanding. He said the state had already determined the dam was unsafe but failed to take meaningful action, such as restricting its operation or requiring lower water levels.
Marker said that if the state identifies a dam as unsafe or nonfunctional, it should take stronger action rather than simply noting its condition.
In November 2019, the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy acknowledged dam safety concerns, with legal counsel warning of an “imminent danger” if water levels aren’t lowered.
Hurley said, even before the dam’s failure, “there was a lot of gossip going around that the man that owned the dams, Boyce Hydro, was crazy and wasn’t listening to anybody and doing what he wanted and threatening to drain the lakes.”
The state had a strong case against Boyce Hydro, but when it filed for bankruptcy, the state stepped aside so more money could go to the flood victims.
Hamann disagreed, saying the state has not treated residents fairly.
The lawsuit was intended to give residents some compensation for damages and losses that occurred after the event. Those whose houses were counted as “second homes,” such as cottages or cabins, received little support.
Hurley and her family didn’t get any money from FEMA, but United Way gave them $400 to rebuild. She said she was grateful because this home wasn’t her first home, but that was all the financial support they got.
“Of course, it was going be a few years before we retire, but that’s completely off the books now , because we’ve had to completely rebuild, and now we’ve been taxed,” she said. “They basically put a $40,000 mortgage on the house.”
Hamann added that many cabins along rivers and lakes in Midland County were built in the 1940s, right after World War II. Some date back to the 1930s and were small, simple weekend retreats passed down through families for generations.
Now, some of those families can no longer afford to keep them and risk losing them. Residents have tried to raise awareness, but say little help is coming.
Before this decision, 75-year-old retiree Marlene Nelson said that she and her husband would continue to live in Edenville for as long as they could afford it.
“I hope I live long enough to get a check from the State,” she said.
Flood devastation
Nelson described her home as “Grammy’s house, a place where family gatherings were held, meals served and memories made.”
Nelson said the dam’s failure was life-changing.
The family’s home went from a 2,000-square-foot house to 600 square feet in a matter of hours.
“We actually walked in, and it looked like someone dirty and angry had gone into the house,” she said.
Nelson’s house was lifted off its foundation. Her refrigerator was upside down and her dishwasher was filled with dirty water. The trash can was washed behind the refrigerator, and shredded paper from a few days earlier lined the walls – showing exactly where the water had reached in her living room.
From viewing water stains in her garage, Nelson concluded the water level had reached 7 feet.
Mike Marker, a 76-year-old retiree, said he didn’t think his family would have any problems with a flood.
“I’ve lived in many different houses on [Sanford Lake] all through the years since I was about 10 years old, so I’m very familiar with the lake,” he said.
By the time evacuation started, the walkout basement outside his home was underwater, and it had slowly begun to seep into the main level of his house, reaching about 2 feet before he and his wife evacuated to stay with his son.
His wife had four cats, and she tried to get them out of the house, Marker said. The couple had to leave them behind during the flood.
Before leaving, Marker thought the house would float away. When he returned home early the next day, the house was completely flooded, with water reaching 2 feet up on the second floor. The cats were safe, he said, adding that they climbed on furniture to get away from the water.
The next day, his wife’s nephew called to say he had a fifth-wheel trailer he no longer needed. He brought it over and set it up in their front yard, where they lived for about six weeks while the house was being rebuilt.
“[The flood was] probably harder on my wife than I realized,” Marker said. “But I took it more as a challenge to rebuild the house,” adding that he didn’t feel overwhelmed, just shocked at the sheer height of the water level.
Hamann and his girlfriend lived in an apartment above the master suite in his house for 32 days.
“We stayed in Sanford and started rebuilding, and there were only two places in town that had lights because they had to shut all the gas off all the electricity off,” he said. “My house and the gas station.”
At the time of the flood, there was about 50 inches of water in the main floor of his downtown Sanford home. He described the force of the water as horrendous. It tore out the entire Saginaw Road where it crossed a bridge from east to west, flipping asphalt and concrete and carrying massive sections – some 60 feet wide and 100 feet long – hundreds of feet downstream. The flood also gouged craters as deep as 20 feet into the roadway.
“The mud on the ground was so slippery — you had to hold hands to walk and brace yourself because you just step your foot down on your foot and come up from underneath it,” Hamann said, adding, “It was just devastating.”
Hurley and her husband bought their house located just past Sanford, intending it to be their retirement home.
“It basically came in like a tsunami. Then, when the Sanford Dam broke, the water whooshed out, and we were left with a muddy mess,” she said.
Four feet of water destroyed everything beneath it, Hurley said. It was enough water to knock over her refrigerator. The weekend before, her husband had just finished remodeling the master bathroom.
“We had to rip everything out and literally build from scratch 4 feet down, and that was really hard,” Hurley said.
“We had to get a dumpster, and I had to watch all our furniture, all our brand-new appliances, everything get thrown away that we had just purchased.”
She said she thinks the devastation contributed to a heart attack and stroke right after the dam failure.
‘People showed up’
Not even a day after the dam failed, people began to help residents.
“At about 7:30 in the morning, I put a notice on Facebook that I’d been flooded and I could use all the help I could get,” Marker said. “It was very emotional because like 70 people showed up to help me gut my house, to take all the drywall, the flooring. By 1:00 that afternoon, my house was gutted.”
In the immediate aftermath, Hamann said, there was no clear direction on how to start cleaning up – people began picking up what they could and moving what they could, trying to make sense of the devastation, all while the COVID-19 pandemic was unfolding.
He noted that for those dealing with the destruction, the pandemic seemed to fade into the background. It wasn’t discussed among those affected.
In the years since, he had been asked multiple times how the community managed to get through COVID-19, but he said it never even came up at the time.
Instead, Hamann highlighted the overwhelming support from others.
Amish communities from across Michigan arrived to help, setting up kitchens in local churches, preparing hot meals and delivering food to residents. Food trucks and church groups also came, while volunteers cleaned out homes and remove debris.
“People showed up, and we had trash everywhere and garbage everywhere,” Hamann said.
“They showed up with their personal vehicles and big trailers that they got hold of and loaded them off and took them all to the dumps.”
According to conversations Hamann had with landfill officials and the city manager, the volume of debris was extreme – equivalent to six years’ worth of waste deposited in just a few months.
In a Facebook post on April 24, 2026, Ven Johnson Law, the firm representing residents of Edenville, posted: “While the decision [dismissing their lawsuit] is disappointing for the thousands of flood victims who have been waiting six years for justice and accountability, the fight is far from over. Our attorneys will appeal this decision and present the facts we believe warrant a second review.”
“We will continue to fight for the people of mid-Michigan who still live with the damage caused through no fault of their own.”
This article was updated on June 22, 2026.