Displaced by dam failure
Just nine years after a house fire caused Sean Murphy to move into his home in Sanford, a flood displaced him from it. Now living with his dog Layla in a camper outside the house, Murphy is slowly but surely rebuilding what he had before the flood that devastated thousands in the Mid Michigan area last May. The dam failure on Wixom and Sanford lakes displaced many whose homes were impacted by the flooding, including Murphy, who was given a glimpse of hope just a bit too soon.
“On the news they said it was fine, dams are safe, they won’t break…and then the alarms went off again and the fire trucks started coming and people started running through the yards telling us to get out,” Murphy said. “They said this whole place will be under water in 15 minutes.”
Luckily, the neighborhood had a bit more than 15 minutes to evacuate, but when they returned to their homes, the damage was immeasurable. The water in Murphy’s home came up to three feet and left the streets and driveways covered in a layer of slick mud. Murphy’s neighbor, Kim Twarozynski attested to the severity of the lake’s debris.
“We were covered in mud for months,” Twarozynski said. “We started giving ourselves monikers like ‘flood zombies.’”
The lack of media exposure has left flood victims like Murphy and Twarozynski feeling forgotten since the disaster nearly six months ago. Even directly after the flood, Sanford was a town largely impacted, yet scarcely covered.
“I was surprised how much the news didn’t really cover too much.” Murphy said. “I don’t think people knew the scope of the damage. A lot of my friends that I don’t talk to that often would say ‘oh I didn’t realize it was that bad over there,’ but they don’t really realize…my home is gone.”
Since the Sanford Dam failure, Murphy has been slowly recovering, now in the process of moving from his camper into his detached garage for the winter. Soon, builders will begin working on his home’s renovation, with Murphy hopeful that it will be completed sometime in the next year.