A hard night to cap off a catastrophic weekend of flooding.

The Thunder Bay River was flowing across Washington Avenue Park, down Washington Avenue, and was beginning to flood basements and back up sewers.

In a desperate attempt to limit the damage, the crew began building levees along the river using a combination of logs, sand, dirt bags, and anything else they could find nearby. No sooner did they slow the flow in one place than it found another.

By 4 o’ clock Sunday afternoon, the scene of the battle had shifted to the Alpena County Fairgrounds. By then, bales of hay had been added to the mix of levee materials. Finally, late Sunday, the waters began to recede.

Courtesy Photo The collapse of the 9th Avenue Bridge, which was then only seven years old, is seen during the flood of April 1923.

But not before the river had taken a costly toll.

It was April 1923.

2 BRIDGES DOWN, 2ND AVE BRIDGE IN DOUBT

Shortly after noon on Saturday, fissures appeared in the 9th Avenue Bridge, and its fate was all but certain. On Sunday, when the bridge collapsed into the river, the city asked Walter Bates, “blaster” of the Michigan Alkali Quarry, to blast the bridge debris from the river to prevent flooding of the 9th Avenue Dam powerhouse.

Bates also dynamited a log and debris dam that had piled up against the 2nd Avenue Bridge, threatening that structure.

Courtesy Photo The lowlands above Alpena dams are seen inundated with water during the flood of April 1923.

Then the river turned its attention to Chisholm Street Bridge. The bridge was not designed to carry such a flood and was backing up the already-full Lake Besser, contributing to the flooding along Washington Avenue and the fairgrounds. At 4 o’ clock Sunday, its south arch began showing cracks, and, by that evening, it had collapsed into Lake Besser.

Now, there was a new “dam” on the river in the form of the collapsed Chisholm Street Bridge. Lake Besser was probably nearly three feet higher above the collapsed bridge than below it.

Through it all, the 9th Avenue Dam powerhouse and the then-10-year-old 9th Avenue Dam continued operations.

The collapse of 9th Avenue Bridge backed up the river to within just a few inches of the powerhouse windows. Had the powerhouse flooded, Alpena and its industries would have lost power (the Thunder Bay River dams are no longer a critical source of power for the Alpena area).

On Wednesday, April 25, 1923, the Steamer Wyandotte went aground in the mouth of the Thunder Bay River, having run onto a debris bar that had been washed into the navigation channel by the flood. The channel, which had been dredged to a depth of 21 feet the previous fall, now was as shallow as 12 feet.

Gas and telephone lines to the city’s north side washed out. The North Side would be without gas for a week. The telegraph line under the river was an unintended casualty of the dynamiting of the debris dam at 2nd Avenue Bridge.

Only 2nd Avenue Bridge remained to connect the north and south sides of Alpena, and its abutments were sinking.

By Monday morning, the north abutment of the bridge sagged noticeably, but then stabilized. A guard was stationed to monitor the situation as traffic continued to flow. Again, city crews were tasked to work day and night on a temporary repair. On Friday, the bridge was closed so those repairs, which would take about three days, could render the bridge temporarily usable.

The nearest alternative bridge to the north side was Lachine-Long Rapids, a distance of 25 miles.

The cost to the city would be felt for years to come. Although the City Charter allowed it to take out loans for emergency situations, the costs were such that all future street improvements were put on hold almost indefinitely.

HARSH, LATE WINTER SETS STAGE FOR FLOODING

The winter had been an exceptionally rough one.

Roads were impassable except by sleigh until mid-April. Railroad cuts were drifted in with as much as 20 feet of snow and plow engines were running the rails daily.

On April 19, ice at Long Lake was still two feet thick, and Frank LaComb reported a great day of cutting and harvesting ice there — that was pre-refrigerator.

As of April 13, there was too much ice for the shipping season to begin. But then on April 19 came a heat wave and record-setting warm temperatures.

But more than a harsh winter was behind the flood damage.

Because the river’s watershed had been clear-cut of almost all timber, the snow melted much faster than it should have.

On April 24, Lewis Kline reported that, where the timber was gone, so was most of the snow, but, under the few remaining woodlots, there were still two to three feet of snow that had been shaded by the overstory of trees and shrubs.

All of northern Michigan had suffered the denuding of its forests. Other communities suffered severe flooding that spring, including Cheboygan, Tower, and Ontonagon.

The 9th Avenue and Chisholm Street Bridges, both less than 10 years old, had been designed for flood stages of the past and were not up to those record-high discharges.

The low capacity of the Chisholm Street bridge caused the bridge to back up water and to virtually a become dam as its south arch collapsed into the river.

COULD SEVERE FLOODING HAPPEN AGAIN?

We can take comfort in knowing the watershed is in much better condition than in 1923.

Today, 75% of the watershed is forested or in wetlands. Soil permeability is high, meaning a high percentage of precipitation soaks into the soil. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources’ Thunder Bay River assessment reports that most tributaries to the Thunder Bay River are exceptionally stable and seldom flood. The bridges have been rebuilt to higher standards and the logging debris that created debris dams is mostly gone.

Does that mean the flood of 1923 can’t happen again?

Not necessarily.

The climate has changed, storm severity has increased, and precipitation events of the past are not reliable predictors of future flood events.

The 4 Mile and 9th Avenue dams were almost new in 1923, and the Norway Point Dam would be built in 1924. The average age of those dams today is 111 years old.

The licensed purposes of the three dams are hydroelectric generation and recreation. They do not provide flood control benefits, because they are maintained at full pool to maximize hydraulic head for power generation. They are now owned by Eagle Creek Renewable Energy, a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation.

If that sounds a lot like the dams on the Tittabawassee near Midland before Edenville Dam collapsed in spring of 2020, that’s because the Thunder Bay River’s dams are of the same vintage and operated the same way. The 9th Avenue Dam actually raises the river level to within about six to eight feet of the elevation of certain portions of Washington Avenue, which was why the city flooded in 1923.

All three dams are classified as “high risk” because they are upstream of a population center.

The risk factors are different today than in 1923, as can be seen in the Alpena County Hazard Mitigation Plan of 2021 (Google “Alpena County Hazard Mitigation Plan at Discover Northeast Michigan”).

Natural hazards are a fact of life when a natural resource and human development are side-by-side, which is a way of defining Alpena, a fine city with a river running through it.

Don La Barre and the staff of the Alpena Public Library Special Collections helped collect newspaper and photo records for this story. Jim Johnson is a retired fisheries biologist and member of the Board of Trustees at Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan. More photos and a fuller narrative can be viewed on the Besser Museum’s website.

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