AFTER THE RAIN

A YEAR LATER, FLOOD VICTIMS LOOK AHEAD

It was, in a word, catastrophic. The May 19 flood that devastated communities from Beaverton to Midland was the worst in a generation, and probably the most destructive ever. Thousands of people displaced. Hundreds of homes destroyed. Three-hundred-sixty-five days of recovery. Some damage was temporary, some was permanent. It all was life-changing. It also gave rise to countless stories of compassion, humanity and, amazingly, optimism. Here are five of them.

THE VETERAN: DEFENDING HIS HOME

Fifty-two-year-old Terry Hall lights a cigarette, the empty lake with nothing but the Tittabawassee River gently flowing in the background. Patio chairs, a garage, a grill and a small charming house are part of the property that Terry calls home. He had to live in his conversion van after the flood hit and he was forced to remodel his house. But as for the tragedy that dramatically changed the lives of thousands of people, the former veteran utters the words of those who have seen the world’s many hardships. 

“It could have been worse.”

As the flood waters started to rise that fateful day, Terry dismissed the evacuation warnings. He thought it was impossible that the water would do any severe damage to his house, which sits nine feet above Sanford Lake’s standard level. He stayed on his property and watched the chaos unfold. 

When Terry realized the water would, in fact, damage the inside of his home, he shut off the gas and electricity but continued to defend his property. The water reached three feet outside and ten inches inside, requiring him to completely gut the place. This also forced him to live without a stove or fridge for nearly six months and rely primarily on grilled food. 

While these conditions would be quite difficult for many people, it wasn’t a big deal for Terry. His two decades of army training made him accustomed to roughing it. 

“As rough as it was here, it was nothing compared to my time overseas,” Terry says. “My 21 years of service probably put me in a better position than other people.”

 Even though he acknowledges the impact the flood had on others’ lives, Terry views it as a sort of personal rebirth. Through various veterans assistance programs, FEMA and Home Depot gift cards, he remodeled his house, with renovations totalling around $50,000. 

After receiving financial assistance, Terry wasted no time and got straight to work ordering appliances, applying floor tiles and building a temporary make-shift kitchen. It wouldn’t feel like home for Terry if he hadn’t taken these steps to restore and even improve the pleasant lakeside feel of the house. 

For Terry, this was more than a reclamation project. Because of everything he’s been through, he’s especially proud of what he’s been able to build, and tends to focus on what he has, not what he’s lost. 

“I concentrate on what is going to be, not what is,” he says. “You can’t change what today is, but you can create a change for tomorrow. As long as I plan for a change, I can do it.” 

After medically retiring in 2014 and moving to his current residence in 2017, Terry looked forward to fishing on the lake’s 35 miles of shoreline. For now, those plans are on hold. Nothing is left of the lake except a narrow river snaking through the grass-covered lake bed that has grown in since the flood. 

As he surveys the empty lake, it’s obvious that the hard times he’s faced, especially in the last year, were nothing he couldn’t handle. 

“When I look outside, I don’t see all of the grass,” he says, gesturing toward the devastation. “I don’t dwell on what was lost. I just look at the water we do have and in my mind’s eye, it’s the whole thing.”

THE MOTHER: GIVING HELP, GETTING HELP

 Jess Beal works more than 60 hours a week and represents a decent portion of Sanford residents: hard working, community-focused individuals who gave their all to their fellow neighbors after the flood left their neighborhood in shambles. Jess and her family helped clean up in the flood’s wake, but when it was time for her to receive financial assistance for her destroyed well, the government let her down. 

But her landlord didn’t.  

Jess and her children, 20-year-old Elijah and 16-year-old Melody, live in the Sanford Lake Road subdivision. Their neighborhood, which used to showcase beautiful lake scenery complete with a sandy beach, playground and community boat launch, is now completely bare, with tree stumps and car-sized craters in its place. 

Jess’s family watched in awe from the relative safety of their house that sits 35 feet above the water. Furniture, boats, and peoples’ entire livelihoods rushed across Sanford Lake at terrifying speeds. Jess - protective and determined - decided against evacuation, despite warnings of immense danger flashing on her phone; she had too much invested in her home. The snapping and breaking of trees reverberated as a force of water rushed toward the land. Total panic and chaos ensued.

“It was like a really awful TV show,” Jess says, “that you just couldn’t take your eyes off of.”

After the damage was done, the neighborhood’s public beach, playground, and boat launch - originally built with community funds - were completely demolished. In other neighborhoods, these amenities could be replaced somewhat easily. In this subdivision, though, it took years to raise the money and hours to destroy it; and it’ll take years to raise it again. 

Jess’s family joined others in the neighborhood in devoting more than 10 hours a day to clearing the neighborhood destruction. If the community wasn’t intensely tight-knit before, they were now. Trailers, jet skis and boats were stacked on each other, a sad metaphor for peoples’ lives being washed away in just one afternoon. 

Three days after the flood hit, Jess's family - which had just put its blood, sweat and tears into clearing the area wreckage - lost its electricity and well, leaving them no choice but to conduct everyday tasks anywhere but their home. 

“We were on generators for a whole week,” Jess says. “Everyone was - that’s all you could hear. We had to go to other places to shower and wash clothes, and we were pretty much fast-fooding it. It was a battle.”

The owner of Jess’s home, who prefers to remain anonymous, grew up in the same house and rents it out to the family. The landlord has an emotional attachment to the area, so naturally, she did everything in her power to save the well. The landlord appealed to FEMA, her insurance and various government-funded public entities to solve the problem. 

“Each time I applied,” she says, “I was denied because it wasn’t my primary residence; Jess was denied because she didn’t own the property.” 

After repeatedly being turned away because of a technicality, Jess’s landlord had to pay close to $5,000 for the well out of her own pocket. She couldn’t let Jess, Melody and Elijah go without running water, and she didn’t want to see her childhood home rendered uninhabitable. 

“Short of forcing them to move out and condemning the place as unlivable,” she asks, “what else could I do?” 

The fight over the well lasted about two months, but eventually, the family regained running water and electricity. Aside from the damage done to the neighorhood’s public area, Jess does not feel sorry for her situation and is thankful that she still has her home.

“I’m just grateful for what we still have,” she says. “There are people who lost everything. I don’t have bad feelings about what happened.” 

THE VOLUNTEER: CALM AMID THE CHAOS

Jayvin Balzer had a feeling that something was off when he got the dispatch that evening of May 18. Jayvin is a volunteer first-responder for Beaverton’s fire department and has seen a lot in his young life. But it’s safe to say that he wasn’t prepared for the destruction the flood and dam breaches would cause. 

It’s safe to say that no one was. 

Beaverton born-and-raised and already a committed community servant at age 19, Jayvin hurried down to the fire department as soon as he got the call. He was surprised by the chaos in the station - radio chatter, volunteers everywhere and a genuine sense of urgency. This was the moment when he began to understand this disaster’s true potential.  

“When I got to the station, I’m not going to lie, it was hectic,” Jayvin says, trying to find the words to describe the event. “When I put my gear on, I knew it was bigger than our town. It was county-wide and possibly a state issue.”

Jayvin wasn’t the only one unsure of the severity of the situation. 

“I looked down the locker bay and everyone’s face was basically in shock,” he says. “That’ll always stick in my mind. Nobody was too sure what we were walking into.”

For the next day-and-a-half, Jayvin and his crewmates tirelessly worked in the Wixom and Edenville areas. They primarily gave evacuation warnings and helped elderly and disabled residents grab necessities and seek shelter elsewhere. Those individuals were the first responders’ top priority as the flood became increasingly dire.

“The way the water level was rising was unreal,” Jayvin says. “We went to this older couple’s house to help get them out, and when we arrived the water was high, but nothing too dramatic. Five, ten minutes later when we were leaving, their porch was completely submerged.

“I quickly realized the water was rising a lot faster than I anticipated,” Jayvin adds.

After helping a great number of people relocate for the evening, Jayvin made a pillow out of his coat, slept for a few hours and woke up to do it all again the next day. The station could not afford to not have people on standby, so there were personnel on site for more than a day. Though Jayvin did not live in an area affected by the flooding, the catastrophes he witnessed firsthand weighed on him regardless. 

If this experience taught Jayvin anything, it’s that peoples’ lives are fragile; they can change in an instant.

“When it happened, it really took a toll on me and I was quite scared for a few people,” he says. “I was in shock. It made me feel heartbroken for everyone involved.”

An aspiring drone controller for the Air Force, Jayvin is heavily involved in his community and possesses an innate desire to serve those who need help. As he considers the prospect of tackling the same opportunity to help if the flood came today - and the despair and heartbreak that would come with it - he doesn’t hesitate, not for a minute. 

“Absolutely,” he says. “I’d absolutely do it again.”

THE HOMEOWNER: MOUNTING CHALLENGES

After three-and-a-half years of staying in the same apartment, Chad Keyes was finally about to move into his own home. Chad is almost completely blind, and the project being nearly completed was something he could count on and anticipate. 

Until the house was completely washed away by the flood.

Chad, who suffers from the hereditary eye disease choroideremia, was staying at his parents’ house on the Titabawasee River as his forver home’s construction was wrapping up. As the rainfall became heavier and the flood waters rose, Chad obsessively checked the river to see when the flood would crest. Once that happened, he reasoned, things could be somewhat normal again.

Chad received an alert that the Edenville Dam had breached. “Pack a bag!” Chad yelled to his parents from across the house. “We’ve got to leave!” Immediately after warning his parents, Chad heard his father call out for him, saying that he was in deep trouble. 

He was having a heart attack. 

Chad rushed over to his father and called 9-1-1.

“I told him I was right there with him and that it was okay,” Chad says. “It’s weird what your mind does to you in those moments.”

Chad waited with his father for EMS to arrive, but because those crews were stretched so thin already, only one worker was available. Chad’s brother-in-law also showed up and ushered Chad, his parents, two poodles and two cats out of the house and to safety via rowboat. Even though help came, by no means did it mean that everything was all right. Chad was now facing crises on multiple fronts. 

“With all that was happening with my house, my parents’ house and my dad’s health, it was hard to keep myself together,” he says. “I was trying to get a few things in a bag because I knew the Sanford Dam wasn’t going to hold up, and there’s my dad getting loaded into an ambulance at the end of the driveway. Definitely something I’m never going to forget.”

For the next couple days, Chad’s father received intensive care as Chad stayed at his sister’s house. His 48th birthday fell on May 20. But Chad had no time to be worried about himself; he was mostly concerned about his parents. 

“If I had time to think about anything,” Chad says, “I was feeling bad for my parents because they’re older, and what they were going to suffer because of it. I was devastated for them.”

In the days after the flood’s destruction, Chad and his brother-in-law got to an area where they could look across the river at Chad’s parents’ house. His new house was out of sight and covered by dense woods. The only thing out of the ordinary was that the lawn chairs at his parents’ house were gone. Chad still held out hope for both his parents’ house and his soon-to-be home.

Sadly, he would never see its completion . 

A few days later, he was finally able to get to his house. He discovered that his home was completely swept off the foundation and, presumably, carried down the river. This destroyed his hopes of having his own place, not to mention that this was supposed to be his forever home. 

Thankfully, this wasn’t the end of his story.

Today, Chad has moved back to the apartments he lived in before all of the chaos, which at least brings a sense of familiarity. The silver lining of the whole saga is that Chad has a new house being built; he’ll move in this fall. He’s eager to have his own space and be a homeowner, and he’s somehow found a way to see the bright spots of this particularly dark moment in local history. 

“It would be easy to feel discouraged, and sometimes I do,” he says, “especially with my life circumstances of losing more vision and knowing eventually I will be completely blind. It has made staying positive difficult, but I’m still able to do it.

“It's just a little more challenging.”

THE TEENAGER: A NEW PERSPECTIVE

First came the blaring sirens. Then came the flashing lights. Never anticipating how severe the damage would become, Kadence Nickel and her family chose to ignore evacuation warnings, stay on their Wixom Lake property and prepare for only a few inches of flooding.

That was all they expected. But this was only the beginning. 

A few hours later at nearly 2 a.m., Kadence awoke to two feet of water in the garage and water seeping through the air vents. Her family hatched a new plan to clear out by sunrise. 

Gathering only important possessions, Kadence’s family prepared to head for a hotel where Kadence’s mother was staying. (Kadence’s mother, a Sanford Lake resident, had evacuated the night before). A problem, though, was how the family would get to the car; their well-kept front lawn was now four feet deep with murky, dark water. 

“We had no choice but to kayak over our yard,” says Kadence, now a 16-year-old Beaverton junior. “My dad could walk, but it was up to his waist and the water was dark brown, so you couldn’t see to the bottom.”

Upon arriving at the hotel, the Nickel family’s stress doubled as each of her parent’s houses was at risk of severe flood damage. At her mother’s house, Kadence’s bedroom and three cats were in the basement. Neither her personal belongings nor her pets were moved up to the first story of the house, and as a girl with a special attachment to her cats, this worried her deeply. With nothing to do about the situation, Kadence’s helplessness was heightened.

“I had nowhere to go,” she says.

After hours of waiting for some sign of hope, Kadence got the news that her father’s house was unlivable and her mother’s basement was flooded. 

“When both houses were damaged, it was hard to figure out where to stay,” Kadence says. “I was so shaken up that it didn’t hit me that we were experiencing a historic flood that would impact both of my houses.” 

Aside from the flooding in the basement of her mother’s house, it was intact. And despite the relative luck that one house was habitable, Kadence was still forced to move out of her father’s house - and her childhood home. 

“It’s very sad because I grew up in that house,” she says. “I couldn’t wrap my mind around the amount of damage that could happen in such a short time.”

Many individuals whose lives have been completely altered by the flood have had to learn tough life lessons in the most severe ways; Kadence is no exception. 

Today, she has moved into a new house that she adores, and although the loss of her house saddens her, she has come to view life after the flood as a fresh start. She believes that she’s come out a significantly stronger person. 

“I know the flood hurt a lot of people, but I’ve grown as a person,” Kadence says, putting words to this realization, perhaps for the first time. “I’m more grateful for what I have now. You never know when what you have will be taken from you, and you’ll have to start fresh.

“I have a new perspective on things.”