Jonathan Korbecki was relaxing at home on the Thornapple River one rainy February night when the fire marshal knocked on his door, warning the nearby Labarge Dam may fail and send a wall of water his way.
Hundreds of yards of trucked-in sand prevented disaster that 2018 night at the high-hazard dam, where a failure could have killed nearby residents, washed out a bridge and potentially triggered downstream dam breaches.
But eight years later, federal records show lingering risks.
Water seeps through the dam’s embankment, the spillway is too small to pass a major flood and the gates controlling water flow past the dam are in a “deteriorated condition,” according to an April 27 report from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates hydropower dams like LaBarge.
