Neighborly kindness takes on a whole new meaning when your next-door neighbor offers you a ride on his tractor. On June 15-17, 2018, this scene wasn’t uncommon in Houghton County. Father’s Day weekend brought the “1,000-year storm,” and people across the county joined the Houghton County Road Commission (HCRC) in transporting residents to safety.
“They [the residents] weren’t asking ‘what can you do for us?’” Kevin Harju, PE, engineer-manager of the HCRC, said. “They were asking, ‘what can we do for you?’ Of course, we’re still a long way from recovered from the flood, but we’ve been working on it. The funding has been an issue, but everyone understands that it’s going to take a few years to recover from such a big event.”
With over seven inches of rain falling in just three days, Houghton County sustained significant damage, including 60 sinkholes, 150 road washouts and 150 damaged roads. Landslides, boulders and debris blocked access to some residents’ homes. Some roads were closed for days. Now 18 months later, recovery is three-quarters complete, and residents continue to offer their support.
“We had approximately $22.5 million in damage on our federal aid system,” Harju said. “We’ve got probably 60-70% of that completed and we still have some jobs we plan to finish before winter. On our local system with FEMA, we have about $5 million of work completed, so that’s far less than the $16 million of needed repairs on the local system.”
Houghton County hopes it won’t see the need for tractors as rescue vehicles anytime soon. But the HCRC knows it can count on residents to step up to the plate should the need ever arise.
Houghton County’s Father’s Day storm is featured in the Winter 2019 edition of Crossroads, the quarterly journal of the County Road Association (CRA) of Michigan, which can be viewed digitally or downloaded at https://micountyroads.org/newsroom/crossroads/.