Flood of 2024: Mill Dams in Manawa, WI, and in Faribault, MN

Manawa: (Satellite)

Faribault: (Satellite)

These are two of the flood incidents of 2024.

Manawa

nbcnews, WGBA

Four screenshots from FOX6 1:25 video:

1
[Note that the lake level is now down to the level of the river. I saw a photo from the bridge that shows the lake is drained, but I could not find it again.]

2

3, cropped
[This was caused by just a 5" rain. It doesn't look like any of the gates are raised.]

4, cropped

The dam was breached at about 1:45pm, Friday, Jul 5, 2024. A rodeo and parade scheduled for the weekend had to be cancelled. The campground for the rodeo is one of the areas that got flooded. "At the height of the emergency, several nursing homes were evacuated as well....All entrances to Manawa, about 55 miles west of Green Bay, were blocked, the city said on its Facebook page." And several streets in town are under water. Police Chief "Severson disclosed that crews were able to 'get on the dam and start to open it up to relieve some of that pressure.'" [cbsnews]

The evacuation was cancelled after a few hours at 5pm Friday. But some streets were still closed near the rodeo grounds. [nbcnews]

A bunch of articles said the dam didn't fail. The concrete part didn't fail, but the earth part sure did. In my book, that is a dam failure. It looks like there are three hand-cranked gates and an emergency spillway. Why didn't the workers "relieve pressure" before the water went over the dam?

Street View, Oct 2016

.

Faribault

Street View, Oct 2015

This is one of the flood incidents of 2024. We have already seen in Minnesota, Rapidan Dam, that a concrete dam can fail by eroding the earth beside the dam.

July 4, 2024:

2:16 video @ 0:11
"Crews are working to stabilize an overflowing dam next to one of the last vertical wool mills in America."