SANFORD — Walking into what's now a stripped-down shell of the kitchen at Alex's Railside Restaurant, there was still a stench of rotting meat Wednesday morning lingering more than two weeks after eight feet of floodwaters swamped the longtime dining establishment.
When billions of gallons of water from the breached Sanford Dam came rushing through this mid-Michigan hamlet of 800 residents on the evening of May 19, it picked up and relocated heavy objects like garage roofs, camping trailers, riding lawn mowers and industrial air conditioning units.
At Railside Restaurant, an outside steel freezer unit storing 68 turkeys and 600 pounds of ground beef was lifted by the floodwaters and turned into the building, jamming the door shut for two weeks — without power.
On Wednesday afternoon, a construction contractor moved the freezer back into place with a SkyTrack crane and volunteers helped extract the rotting food inside — the last dirty job from a nightmarish cleanup for co-owners Wilson Gum and Robert Long, who saw their life's work washed away by the dam disaster on Wixom and Sanford lakes.
"You can't even describe it," Gum said of the foul task of cleaning out the freezer.
After being shut down since mid-March because of the coronavirus pandemic, businesses in Sanford's quaint downtown are now playing the post-flood waiting game to find out whether they'll be compensated for their losses by the state or federal government or one of the numerous lawsuits against the owners of the two dams.
"It's going to be years before we recover, for sure," said Troy Webb, co-owner of J&D Plumbing & Heating Ltd., a commercial and residential contractor based in downtown Sanford. Webb's multibuilding complex was under 10 feet of water, ruining machines, a work truck and countless feet of pipe meant for freshwater use that's now caked in mud.
Gum and Long are trying to figure out how to rebuild in a town whose future is none too certain after cascading dam failures drained Sanford and Wixom lakes — and the local economy that revolved around the man-made impoundments of the Tittabawassee River.
"If there's no people coming through to their cottages, if there's no boating activity, I think it could be a huge challenge for that area to survive," Gum said.
Most have little hope of recouping any losses from their property insurance carriers, who have denied claims because the businesses carried no flood coverage that local owners say they couldn't buy because their properties were never considered to be in floodplain to begin with.
"If a forest fire came through here, we'd be fully covered," Gum said. "And yet a dam failure, which they're claiming is a flood, this is not a natural flood."
In a natural flood, the waters rise gradually. Sanford's big flood waters came all at once after the Edenville dam was breached after a torrential rainstorm soaked the region with four inches of water in less than 48 hours.
"It wasn't like a flood ... this was a river flowing through," said Dennis Sian, owner of Sanford Hardware, a 7,500-square-foot Do It Best-branded store that was filled with 12 feet of water.
The rebirth of Sanford and its businesses all but hinges on rebuilding the nearly century-old dams in Sanford and Edenville that created this lake life haven in Midland and Gladwin counties.
But that's less than certain.
It's complicated by the fact the dams that broke were privately owned by Boyce Hydro Power, a company whose track record of maintenance and upkeep was criticized by federal regulators for nearly two decades.
Neither the state or federal government have committed tax dollars toward reconstruction of the dams.
Wixom and Sanford lakes were built in the 1920s when flood control was the principal objective to damming up the Tittabawassee and Tobacco rivers. The second was to create a recreational economy that flourished for decades.
In recent years, the housing stock on the lakes began to transform from small cottages to bigger year-round homes for retirees and people who drive into nearby Midland every day for work. A common destination is Dow Inc. and the various companies that have been spun out of the chemical giant over the years.
Dow has played a leading role in the local emergency response, setting up eight distribution centers across Midland and Gladwin counties to give away food, toiletries, household supplies and clothes to the thousands of residents whose homes were flooded after the two dams broke. The company used its corporate jet hangar at MBS International Airport in Freeland as a warehouse to supply the distribution centers.
Megan Clark, a Dow engineer who works at the main Midland chemical plant, spent the past two weeks running one of the distribution centers inside an elementary school in Sanford. As a resident of Sanford, she too worries about the town's future.
"Without the lake, a lot of the businesses probably have a difficult time existing because a lot of their business is from the lake," Clark said.
In recent years, a group of property owners on Sanford and Wixom lakes with long careers in major Michigan corporations had set out to buy the dams from Boyce Hydro's Las Vegas-based owner.
The Four Lakes Task Force's board consists current and former executives from Dow, DTE Energy Co. and the Clark Hill law firm, as well as experts in the financial services and renewable energy sectors.
The lake homeowners' association had a $16 million purchase agreement that they intended to close on June 1 before the flood came, said Dave Kepler II, a retired Dow executive who chairs the task force and lives on Sanford Lake.
The deal was to be financed with a special assessment on lakefront property in both counties as well as a hydroelectric power generation agreement with Consumers Energy, Kepler said.
"Obviously the property isn't in the same condition as when we signed on it (in December)," said Kepler, who owns the Midland Brewing Co.
The task force, working with local, state and federal authorities, is now trying to map out a new plan for purchasing and rebuilding the dams, Kepler said.
"This is will be hundreds of millions to do," he said.
Kepler suggested the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers may have an interest in restoring the dams for future flood control, raising the specter of the federal government helping shoulder the cost of a massive infrastructure project.
Either way, it will be several years before reconstruction of the dams can even commence, Kepler said.
"This is a multiyear process and we really don't have a timeline yet," Kepler said.
Just how long it takes to rebuild the dams and lakes may factor into whether longtime business owners do try to rebuild.
At Railside Restaurant, owner Wilson Gum had stocked up on beef at $3.19 a pound the week before the flood to prepare for the full reopening of his restaurant once Gov. Gretchen Whitmer lifted coronavirus restrictions on dine-in service.
"My Sysco rep said, 'Hey, man, beef's $3.19 a pound today. I guarantee it's going up to $5.56 tomorrow. You probably should jump on that.' I said, 'You're right,'" Gum recalled.
Like any shrewd restaurateur would do, Gum jumped.
"And then the dam broke," he said.
Long and Gum have already filled four 40-yard dumpsters with the contents of the restaurant — and all of the mud and debris the floodwaters swept inside.
"We had a pile here that was a $250,000 pile of junk — grills are gone, fryers are shot, anything electrical," Gum said.
Long said he bought the restaurant in 2003 for $750,000 and has invested $250,000 into the building and equipment over the years.
They estimate it will cost at least $400,000 to rebuild the restaurant after the flood waters ruined everything but the studs of the building, the roof, the kitchen exhaust system and a stainless steel salad bar.
Both entrepreneurs are determined to rebuild, if only because the restaurant is still their biggest asset.
Gum, 59, was in the midst of a multiyear agreement to purchase the restaurant and building from Long, 65, who was making retirement plans.
"This was the end game," Gum said.
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