The latest example is widespread flooding this spring that pushed rivers and lakes over their banks, damaging homes, roads and bridges while raising concerns about dam safety across the state.
It follows a growing list of disasters in recent years: a massive ice storm that snarled power lines and damaged millions of acres of forest in Northern Michigan, repeated urban flooding and sewage overflows in Detroit, the dam failures near Midland, and flash floods in the Upper Peninsula that washed out roads and collapsed homes.
Scientists say this pattern is consistent with a warming climate and serves as a warning that Michigan’s infrastructure must be upgraded to keep pace.
Research shows that for every 1-degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold about 4% more water vapor. That has contributed to a 45% increase in heavy downpours in the Midwest over more than six decades, according to Climate Central.
“The warming atmosphere can carry and transport more moisture,” said Andrew Gronewold, a hydrology researcher and associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.
“This water that’s getting dumped on us is being carried by a bigger bucket in the sky. It’s gathering moisture from the oceans. It gathers moisture from across land surface, across the continent, and a lot of it gets dumped right in our region here,” he said.
In Michigan, that shift shows up as heavier snowfall in winter, more intense rainfall in warmer months and stronger ice storms during seasonal transitions.
In fact, the combination of heavy snow accumulation and heavy downpours has been directly blamed for the extreme flooding conditions still ongoing in Northern Michigan.
Perry Samson, an atmospheric scientist and professor emeritus at U-M, said climate change is also shifting where certain extreme weather events happen. He said that for many years the band with high probability of ice storms stretched across the Midwest through Ohio.
“But with the warming climate, it seems that line is moving north,” Samson said. “The probability of this kind of storm happening here in Northern Michigan is going to increase, quite predictably, as a result of a warming planet.”
Aging infrastructure meets stronger storms
Across Michigan, the growing intensity of blizzards and thunderstorms is putting pressure on infrastructure that wasn’t designed for today’s climate.Kevin Harju knows that all too well. He is the manager of the Houghton County Road Commission, which calculated at least $64 million worth of damage to roads and stream crossings during flash flooding there in June 2018.
This summer, the agency expects to finish its final $4 million repair project tied to that extreme weather event, during which as much as seven inches of rain fell in six hours.
“The structure inlet failed and washed the road out. It actually moved out-buildings across the road, buried cars and boulders,” Harju said.
Eight years after that flash flooding, the road commission secured federal approval for the final recovery project. Rebuilding washed-out roads and destroyed culverts with federal emergency funding involved more paperwork than he previously knew, Harju said.
He quickly learned federal highway funding differs from the Federal Emergency Management Agency aid, which requires far more documentation. That’s why he worked with the County Road Association of Michigan to help develop an emergency playbook for this kind of crisis.
“You know who to contact. You know what to do. You know about documentation and photos and making sure you have GPS coordinates on all your photographs and so forth,” Harju said.
It’s a manual expected to be especially useful for road agencies across Northern Michigan in the wake of this spring’s historic flooding and widespread infrastructure failures.
Denise Donohue, the road association’s top executive, said counties are responsible for 75% of the road miles and 53% of bridges in Michigan. In recent years, they’ve noticed a pattern of large-scale destruction from weather events.
“About every 12 to 18 months, there’s a million-, or multi-million-dollar disaster on Michigan county roads,” she said.
Donohue said the crisis playbook they created helps road officials to navigate complicated federal paperwork and improve their chances of reimbursement for roads, culverts and bridges rebuilt as disaster recovery. The association also supports the idea of state lawmakers creating a local disaster relief fund.
“The intent is to help our local road agencies during the times of these disaster emergencies, for things that might not be eligible for FEMA on down the road,” Donohue said.
Gronewold said this spring’s widespread crisis of failed infrastructure is the inevitable confluence of aging roads and bridges and the changes in weather and meteorological patterns.
“These events aren’t going away anytime soon,” he said. “The future is likely to hold more extreme rainfall events, and our infrastructure isn’t getting any newer, unless we replace it.”
And that doesn’t just mean bridges over rivers and culverts at creeks. Drinking water and wastewater systems must also be upgraded, Gronewold said.
“We have to do that looking decades, or some of my friends would say, generations ahead, and we have to do in a way that’s equitable across different communities,” he said.
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