Dear Members,
As bad as what the flooding was last year, it is beyond description this year. Six Mile Lake is underwater by many feet depending on where you live on the lake and several homes are underwater now. More rain is expected for the next three days. If that happens more Six Mile Lake homes will be underwater. Right now, anything within twenty feet of the original shoreline is in danger of floating away. We have three more days of rain expected here. All culverts leading to the lake are rushing with water. The road where the culvert is in Ellsworth is overflowing it’s entire length, the Bellaire Dam is almost at capacity, M66 is flooding, Intermediate Lake Road is flooding and some residents below the Bellaire Dam are evacuating. We are critical here. Right now, 264,000 feet of Upper Chain shoreline is underwater by hundreds of feet and many homes on all lakes above the Bellaire Dam are either underwater or very close to it.
The Antrim County Operator of Dams, Leslie Meyers, who has been working on a solution based on recommendations from the Army Corp of Engineers and others, cannot move forward with the plan to improve the Bellaire Dam and replace the culvert in Ellsworth until the Charlevoix County Board of Commissioners gives her the authority to include the north part of Six Mile Lake and a portion of St. Clair Lake in a special assessment district that, once implemented, would remediate some of what every resident along the Chain is facing now.
This email to you is to inform you of what is happening to your property and to ask you to photograph your homes and frontage during this flooding. Please send emails and photographs to the Charlevoix County Board of Commissioners and to the Charlevoix County Emergency Manager at [email protected] as we can only encourage them to allow Leslie to proceed with the SAD if they get on board. Let me be clear. No one, least of all me, wants an extra tax BUT this flooding will continue to get worse year by year because the interconnected waterways along our Chain have silted in from a depth of eight feet deep in the 1990’s, when we could take our ski boat all the way through the Chain down to Intermediate Lake, to only a foot to six inches of water now in these interconnected waterways. Six Mile Lake drains 68 tributaries which is millions of gallons of water entering into our lake year round and this water feeds the rest of the Chain and is being held up by these silted in waterways. Where does your saturated frontage go? Into the lake and eventually into these channels where it continues to build and now has virtually closed off water movement through the entire Chain.
The Six Mile Lake Association board is meeting next week to look at the various scenarios facing property owners on Six Mile Lake in order to get the right information to our residents about where to go from here. We will put out another communication. In the meantime pray that the rain stops and evacuations will not be necessary. So far, the Bellaire Dam is holding but all that could change with more rain on the way. We do not want a Sanford Lake scenario should the current Bellaire Dam not hold!
Email your photos please!!
Also, you can include the Antrim County Board of Commissioners.
The general mailbox is: [email protected]
We need HELP!!!
Thank you,
Cherie Hogan
Communications/Membership