Alcona county dam failure leaves a hole in a community
Buck’s Pond is now a muddy mess after floodwaters breached its dam
Barton City — This week’s flooding across northern Michigan is being blamed for the collapse of a privately owned dam in Alcona County, washing away the small lake that the structure held back.
Buck’s Pond was reduced to mud this week after its privately owned dam failed, destroying the gravel road over the 94-year-old dam structure.
The dam burst around 8 p.m. Monday, sending all of the water in Buck’s Pond north through Comstock Creek to Hubbard Lake, a large recreational boating lake in Alcona County that’s ringed by summer cottages and year-round homes, said James Plohg, who owns property on the lake.
“As it was rising, it started like just washing little parts of it away,” Plohg told The Detroit News on Thursday. “And then it just got so big that it wasn’t able to contain it. And it just opened up.”
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The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy classifies the Buck’s Pond Dam as a low-hazard dam because its rupture has little downstream impact on other water infrastructure and property.
Lakes in the Green Association, a local homeowners group, owned the dam, according to state records.
It was last inspected in August 2017, according to records in the Michigan Dam Inventory, the state’s catalog of data on the ownership, age and condition of 2,552 dams scattered across Michigan’s Lower and Upper peninsulas.
State records indicate the dam was in “satisfactory” condition, able to withstand a 100-year flood and that it “meets applicable tolerable risk criteria.”
Plohg said the demise of the Buck’s Pond Dam will leave a hole in his and his neighbors’ remote corner of rural Alcona County, located between Oscoda and Alpena.
Plohg said he’s been in contact with state lawmakers who represent Alcona County, hoping they could secure state funding to rebuild the dam — and restore Buck’s Pond.
“It was beautiful,” Plohg told The News. “I mean, people come here to fish. There’s the beach over there. Little kids came to swim, picnics, meetings, a lot of boats, pontoons go around the island. We had (boat) parades on the lake. It’s not much of nothing right now.”
“This doesn’t describe how nice it used to be,” Plohg added.
clivengood@detroitnews.com
DavidG@detroitnews.com
