SANFORD, Mich. (WXYZ) — Five years since hell broke loose in the lakeside village of Sanford, just about everything is on its way back.
Everything except the lake.
Watch the video report below:
"I’d really like to see the water back," business owner Linda Shephard said earlier this month, staring into the former lake that she could now walk across.
Watch drone video over Sanford Lake as it looks today
No one was killed when a 500-year flood tore through Midland County, but some 2,500 homes were damaged or destroyed, businesses were swept away, four lakes were emptied and residents say they were left to fend for themselves.
Just hours before the dams broke, Shephard got the all-clear from the health department to open her dream business — the Sanford Lake Marina — which she'd spent the last year fixing up.
"I have the piece of paper saying: ‘you can open!’” Shephard recalled. “And by 8 o’clock that night, everything was gone.”
Everything from the stocked shelves to the lake itself.
Previous coverage: Years before the Edenville dam broke, federal and state warnings went unheeded
Shephard said she received virtually no help from her insurance company. Because homes and businesses weren’t in a flood plain, almost no one in the area had flood insurance.
FEMA didn't help either, Shephard said, and she wasn’t lucky enough to receive any grants either. To make ends meet, she opened other businesses closer to Saginaw while still working to bring the marina to life.
Sanford is not a wealthy community, and while the lakes were a second home for some, for many, it was their only home.
"That guy lives here full time, that person lives here full time," Shephard said, pointing to homes nearby. "Nobody looked at them. Nobody cared."
When we met Ray Bauers five years ago, he was standing outside his car dealership that had just broken in two. His home was underwater and he and his wife were living in a trailer where they would live for months, even through the winter.
“One day, I was walking out of the Portajohn in the morning, I had a bottle of water. And Marie says, ‘Why do you always carry that water when you go to the Portajohn?’” he recalled earlier this month.
“And I said: ‘in case my butt sticks to the seat.'”
From that day on, Bauers decided it would be easier to live in his badly damaged home — making repairs as he goes — than living in the trailer battling the elements.
With no help from insurance, it would take four long years for Bauers to finish the repairs, relying on his own savings and the kindness of complete strangers.
“There was a group that helped me with the kitchen and the cupboards, and God bless them,” Bauers said. “I was more than grateful, and I wanted to find out who they were to pay them back some day. And they wouldn’t tell me.”
It was a theme we kept hearing throughout Sanford.
“In my whole lifetime, I wouldn’t have imagined the nice things people have done for our community,” said Sanford Village President Dolores Porte.
That spirit of selflessness didn’t recede, she said, after the waters did.
At Cultivate Coffee downtown, the coffee and tea won’t cost you anything. Opening three years after the floods, it’s a place the community can gather, play board games and trade stories. It runs off donations that keep pouring in.
Other businesses have opened too, from ice cream parlors to grocery stores, even a cannabis shop and electric charging stations.
“It’s caused us to reinvent ourselves and get to know our neighbors, if we didn’t already,” Porte said. “And yes, I think the outcome has been phenomenal.”
Not everyone is as optimistic.
Carl Hamann lives just a block away from the Sanford Dam. When it failed, the water in his home reached chest high.
“It was a good year for me,” Hamann said sarcastically. “I turned 65 and lost everything I’d worked for in my entire life.”
The generosity of his neighbors is the only reason he could rebuild. Today, he wants accountability for who he says made this possible.
“They knew this was a problem since 1986,” said Hamann, who also serves on the Sanford village council. “They knew these dams were going to fail. What they didn’t know was when.”
The dams were owned and operated by Boyce Hydro, who the State of Michigan sued, accusing of neglecting the dams for years. A judge ordered Boyce to pay an almost $120 million judgment, but the company filed for bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, the state itself is fending off lawsuits from residents like Hamann, who say the Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy knew that the Edenville Dam was at risk of failure but refused Boyce Hydro’s requests to lower water levels.
The state has fought the case for the last five years, but last week, a judge ruled it can move forward.
“The state of Michigan and the government needs to stand up because they helped cause this,” Hamann said.
Regardless of who’s to blame, this much is clear: residents will be on the hook for more than $200 million to repair the dams, courtesy of special assessments paid over the next 40 years.
If anyone is owed a happy ending after all this, it’s people like Linda Shephard. But two years after the dams failed, she was dealt another cruel blow when her husband died following a brave battle with brain cancer.
“My dream was that he was going to sit up here...watching the girls on their boats, having a good time,” she said. “People’d have been talking to him. I could have seen that for him.”
If there’s a silver lining to these last five years, Shephard said, maybe this is it. In the most painful ways possible, the disaster helped bring into focus what’s easy to lose sight of: that the most important things in life are the ones you can’t replace.
“Me sitting here, wringing my hands every day hoping I can get a grant for this or I get money for this... what is the point?” she said.
“I don’t fear a lot of things. The worst thing has already happened.”
Contact 7 Investigator Ross Jones at ross.jones@wxyz.com or at (248) 827-9466.
