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Tuscola County Board of Commissioners work on restoring Caro Dam

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Creative Commons

The Tuscola County board of commissioners have announced they are working on restoring the Caro Dam nearly a decade after one of the dam’s two floodgates failed.

In April of 2014, one of the trunnion pins on the floodgate rusted through, resulting in water levels in the Cass River to lower. It has also resulted in the disappearance of two lakes along the river. This has disrupted many of the community’s recreational water activities such as fishing, boating, and jet skiing.

The Cass River runs through multiple counties in the thumb including Tuscola, Huron, Sanilac, Saginaw and Genesee.

Since the floodgate’s failure, there have been many proposals on how to fix the dam throughout the years, however, none of them played out.

Many in the community have become concerned with the state of the remaining floodgate as it has been under pressure the past few years as built-up debris has been collecting there since the failure. Members in the community say that if the second gate fails, the river could quickly become a creek.

County commissioner Kim Vaughan says one of his main goals since becoming a county commissioner has been to get the dam fixed.

He says that while the county’s commissioners have announced that they will get the dam fixed, they currently have no plan for when the repairs will begin.

He, along with the rest of the Tuscola County board of commissioners, will meet virtually with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department within the next few weeks to discuss possible solutions towards repairing the dam.

Renae is a newsroom intern covering northwest Lower Michigan for WCMU.