WHY SHOULD HE CARE; HE'S LOST MICHIGAN ALREADY:

Like many disasters, the beginnings of the Michigan dam failures are far removed in time from the actual even, but this event can hardly be described as a mistake. All indications are that this week's historic flooding was caused by years of neglect and mismanagement of a public good that was co-opted for private profit. It doesn't help that the headquarters of Dow Chemical, including a Superfund site with known cancer-causing chemicals, is directly downstream of all this floodwater. 

The owner of the breached dams, Lee Mueller, who heads a company called Boyce Hydro, has been cited numerous times in recent years. State regulators had even revoked one of the company's four dam operating license in 2018 over an inability to handle a major flood. At least two of Boyce Hydro's dams were identified as being "high hazard," meaning that according to the National Dam Safety Program and FEMA, loss of life would likely result if they failed or were incorrectly operated. 

 The potential failure of the Edenville Dam, wrote federal regulators, "would pose a very substantial risk to life and property, and Boyce has repeatedly failed to comply with the orders of the Regional Engineer and other Commission staff or to work with Commission staff to resolve these instances of noncompliance, notwithstanding being given many opportunities to do so." The dam was flagged as unable to handle heavy rainfall as long ago as the 1990s. But Mueller, a Trump supporter who publicly backed the president against impeachment in a Reuters article last year, didn't want to pay to repair them. After years of delay, Boyce Hydro finally agreed to sell the dams to a task force of residents from four neighboring counties who hoped to implement overdue repairs. This is yet another example of the wealthy privatizing their profits and socializing the losses. 

The Army Corps of Engineers says more than half of the nation's 91,458 dams are privately owned, and according to E&E News, a majority of them are more than 50 years old. Jokes about Trump's always-impending and never-arriving "Infrastructure Week" have long gone stale, but it's worth remembering that increased infrastructure spending, like the kind needed to upgrade the nation's aging water infrastructure, was one of Trump's biggest campaign promises. 

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