The Cadillac brand continues to raise awareness about stress, culvert issues Information

CADILLAC — With every downpour, Keith Terwilliger isn’t sure what it will mean for his business, Wexford Jewelers.

Terwilliger owns a Cadillac dealership with Jason Nichols, and the two first noticed a depression in his parking lot about ten years ago. On a rainy Friday afternoon, Terwilliger wanted to highlight the issue of these depressions, sinkholes or whatever name one applies to them.

To do this, Terwilliger invited representatives from the city, chamber of commerce and government to his business to discuss the issue and see the grief with their own eyes.

“My goal (Friday) is really to get awareness and get officials from Lansing and the rest of the state to see what’s going on here,†he said. “It’s really easy to walk by and see a yard and kind of go, ‘Well, something is happening.’â€

However, once they see what’s going on and consider the possibility of 8 to 9 million gallons of water flowing through the Clam River dam or about 3 million when it’s closed and going to the north end of Cadillac, it becomes a big problem, Terwilliger said.

That means affected homes, residents, businesses and schools could be hit with millions of gallons of water. While it may not be the same as the Sanford Dam failure from 2020, it will still be a big deal.

Michigan Economic Development Corporation CEO Tino Breithaupt was among those attending Friday’s news conference in Cadillac. At this stage, he said that when it comes to the issue of what the organization aims to do to help which has not yet been determined.

He said they were in Cadillac a year ago to check the situation and that year the situation has gotten worse. There have been talks with MPs from the area about getting allocations from the state or government funds and they are all still there, he said.

Although the stresses built up slowly at first, over the last four to five years the damage has increased dramatically. Today, there are four major holes, not including those that have already been patched.

Local officials have been aware of the condition of the canal for some time, but efforts to find a solution have fallen into disrepair over the past year or so.

City engineer Connie Boice, along with Prein and Newhof, in March requested $7 million in federal funding to repair the pipes and temporarily buy the city a more permanent solution.

If the tunnel were to collapse, Boice previously told Cadillac News they believe water from the Clam River would back up and flow onto the nearby old railroad bridge, which would carry it north across Mitchell Street and into the neighborhood near Lincoln Elementary School. This can be a worst case scenario, as it can cause the neighborhood to become overcrowded.

Officials from the Department of Natural Resources and the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy have said they would prefer if the pipeline were completely removed from the river “in broad daylight,” although such a project is on the expensive side. — estimated to be around 15 million dollars.

Short-term repairs to the culvert would be less expensive — about $2 million to $4 million, Boice said — and would address immediate safety concerns.

Complicating the problem, however, are lingering questions about who owns the property the canal is on — questions that could affect who ultimately gets grant dollars.

Boice said the answer to the question of who owns the deed to the land where the canal is buried remains difficult in part because it has been bought and sold many times over the years.

City officials have come up with a plan to use pump trucks to divert dammed water to the other side of the Clam River in case the levee collapses.

While they believe there are enough trucks and resources in the area to handle such a situation, Wexford County Emergency Management Director Randy Boike previously said that if there ends up being more water than local pump trucks can handle, they may have to apply help from the state. In the worst-case scenario, Boike said the Federal Emergency Management Agency would have to step in, though he added it would have to be a major disaster for this to happen.

However, ideally, Boike said they would like to avoid having the government or a government agency intervene. At the higher levels of intervention, Boike said there is a tendency not to pay much attention to the views of the local people who may be affected by any solution of the organizations. deem it necessary to address an urgent public health crisis.

At this point, most of the culvert wear has occurred on the southwest side of Mitchell Street, near Wexford Jewelers but there has also been damage on the northeast side of Mitchell Street, where the culvert runs under the Save-A parking lot – Lot. . No damage has occurred under Mitchell Street because it is held by a bridge, not a culvert.

Boice said they believe the culvert under the Save-A-Lot parking lot is about five years behind the culvert under the Wexford Jewelers parking lot in terms of wear and tear, but both sides will need to be addressed soon.

Over the years, the bottom and sides of the culvert have been eroded by the natural acidity of the water from the Mitchell Swamp. He said they believe the south-west side eroded quickly due to dirty water entering that end. As the culvert erodes, the embedded material packed around it is washed away, eventually forming slopes on the surface of the pavement.