The Shiawassee Wildlife Refuge in Saginaw County helped absorb flooding and protect downstream areas.
That could offer clues for how to protect the region as a whole.
State and local experts have already noted that supposedly once in a century flooding has battered the region regularly over the last decade.
About 15% of all the water in the entire Lower Peninsula meets at the Shiawassee flats before heading out to Lake Huron via the Saginaw River. Those flats, according to experts, helped absorb floodwaters after the Edenville dam burst upstream.
Eric Dunton is with the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge. He said that wasn’t the plan as the preserve was established in the 1950s.
“They were established because of their benefit for fish and wildlife but folks at the time realized the effect that the big benefit of flood storage has during these large events has on Saginaw, Bay City, and everyone who lives downstream of where this water meets.”
Dunton said during this year’s floods roughly 10,000 acres of the refuge were flooded. Marshlands are particularly good at absorbing water.
“It doesn’t prevent the flooding but all of those wetlands provide a tremendous amount of flood storage. If all that water wasn’t being stored in the flats that water would be flooding out people’s houses, farmland, businesses.”
Dunton said since 2011 Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge has received roughly $5-million worth of Great Lakes Restoration Initiative funds to help restore and enhance flood planes and wetlands on the refuge.
He said there’s no question the marshlands helped keep down river regions safe.
“Putting more wetlands back on the landscape and being able to keep the water in the uplands and more in the upper part of the watershed before it’s released down is definitely a tool to prevent these major flooding events.”