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Roads Are Flooded Throughout Northern Michigan

Peter Payette

Several Northern Michigan counties have seen flooded out roads and homes.

Wexford County, on Monday, went in a local state of emergency due to flooding. Several roads closed with washouts all over the county.

In Emmet County, one lane of US-31 was closed in the Bay View area.

Brian Gutowski is with the Emmet County Road Commission. He says Monday the lane closure was due to the Tannery Creek flooding.

"We’ve got up to a foot of water right on US-31, and it’s flooding into a couple of the residential streets also, which are county roads," he said.

They’ve seen flooding like this before, but that was before significant drainage improvements were made.

Other counties say this kind of flooding is not normal.

Mason County closed sections of 30 county roads due to flooding.
 
Gary Dittmer is an engineer with the Mason County Road Commission. He says this amount of flooding is unusual.

"We had ranging anywhere from three to five inches of rain in a reasonably short period of time, and the ground is saturated," he said. "The streams were not completely full but running at pretty high capacity. And all that came in a short period of time, and it’s just caused this additional flooding."He says crews are working on making repairs.

In Charlevoix, there was flooding on all roads, but they remained open.

Antrim and Grand Traverse Counties saw minor flooding on roadways.

Road commissioners ask drivers to be cautious and turn around or drive through very slowly.