By Kianna Marquez
After cruising the twists and turns of Huron River Drive, I parked my car in Barton Park’s dirt lot. I collected the tools for this expedition—my phone, waterproof camera (with its orange Kodak floatie), journal, face mask, water bottle and fanny pack—and stood up out of the car. Immediately, I stiffened in awe. The dam I had come to see was not visible though the dense midsummer trees that surrounded the parking lot, but the sound of it thundered.
That day, I had attempted to dress for my role as the avid naturalist, wordsmithing with steel pen, teeming with their sense of the meaning attained by exposure to the great outdoors, but I didn’t really own any clothing like that. I am a practical person with some sense of style, and admittedly, my simple, standoffish fashion came at the price of utility. Instead, I wore black high tops and a black hat with a black mask. I wasted some time standing in the lot because I didn’t feel casual in trying to look casual. I fumbled with my gear, switching which hand would hold what, what would go in the fanny pack and what would go in my pockets. I eventually resolved to mentally prepare myself better for next time and took to the path that led towards the dam.
There was a lone recreational tuber, a young girl in summer attire carrying an inflated donut, walking down this path several yards in front of me. She soon left my view as the path disappeared through a break in the trees I hadn’t previously seen. Quickly, I decided she would be my rabbit to follow and I hastily tracked her into the woods.
After a few bends in the forest path, my tubing rabbit cut towards the river’s edge. I couldn’t follow her further at this point to see her drift off down the gentle Huron River, but my sense of direction led me to continue on the path she cut away from because the river felt close by. Not much farther up this path, I saw an industrial bridge layered with wooden planks; it carried the Barton Nature Area Trail, and all the joggers and dogwalkers who used it, over the Huron River. I heard the dam thundering much louder now to my left, but when I walked onto the bridge, I looked first to my right down the familiar river, to where there were kayakers and swimmers, savoring the moment before I would get my first look at Barton Dam. Then I turned around.
Barton Dam stood with gallons of whitewater rushing out of the top of it, creating a fitting visual for the thundering I heard. It was an old but seemingly sturdy structure that held captive the water from Barton Pond within its concrete columns. There were 6 different sections of the dam where water spilled out from Barton Pond, though I would come to find that 4 more sections extended to the left past the tree cover. The water fell through sluices like waterfalls, though I felt with more assertive intention. I didn’t come to see this part of Ann Arbor for the natural beauty of this waterfall in the Huron River, nor did I come to document the beauty of dam structures like this in Washtenaw County. I came to experience Barton Dam, and in doing so, I noticed how the water fell and I discovered firsthand the power harnessed behind it that caused it to fall in the way that it did.
One might think that Barton Dam would be a restricted area, but this place was well-adapted for visitors. The path transformed into a boardwalk that continued beneath a small railway bridge with some gated protection from above. I was not surprised to find graffiti everywhere under that bridge. The boardwalk concluded at a lookout where I stopped and took in the water that spewed out of Barton Pond in a perfect arc and plunged thirty feet to river below. I was close enough that I could feel the spray of mist from the crashing water. I don’t think I will ever not love that feeling.
Below the dam, the churning water looked soapy with foam, remnants of volatile motion. The hazard signs above the dam read:
DANGER. KEEP AWAY. WHEN HORN SOUNDS LEAVE AREA.
Another one read:
DANGER. WADING BELOW DAM CAN BE HAZARDOUS. GATES ON THE DAM MAY OPEN. LEAVE WHEN THE WARNING HORN SOUNDS.
I thought to myself, “Wait, isn’t this a dam? Aren’t the gates not supposed to open?” I worried that, if the horn sounded, I could be in danger that I hadn’t expected, but I would come to find out that that’s not exactly what the signs meant.
Built in 1913, Barton Dam has floodgates that deal with fluctuating water levels. During sporadic heavy rainfall, the gates are lifted to allow water to flow over the spillways, maintaining the level of Barton Pond. That day had fair weather—if anything they would have to deal with rainfall from days before—but the spillways seemed to be expelling a high volume of water.
My next thought was, “What if the entire dam broke? Would I be swept away?”
The dam looked strong, and as an engineering student, I’ve learned how humans construct infrastructure that contains the water far more powerful than the Huron River. But the tumultuous, spitting-angry nature of the water amazed me, and part of me knows that there is no way to fully control the water’s nature.
I could only gaze at the plunging water for so long, then I left the viewing area for the winding dirt path that traveled through the trees and climbed the vertiginous wooden staircase, only a stone’s throw and a chain link fence away from the arcing water. At the top of these stairs, I stopped to gaze at Barton Pond on my left. True to the name “pond”, the oblong body of water wrapped by a beautiful green treeline, was serene, a placid, waveless blue in the summer sunlight.
At least by appearance, Ann Arbor’s primary source of drinking water was cool, crystalline, and refreshing, and, clearly, I wasn’t the only one to think so. It was the afternoon, and as I rested briefly from the steep stair climb, I counted at least 15 fishermen, walkers, kayakers, tubers, and swimmers, all enjoying the placid water in this lonely summer of anxiety. Then I turned from away from the peaceful scene and faced the dam. A metal gate that guarded the dam’s bridgeway and I opened it and stepped out onto the metal-grate bridge above Barton Dam itself.
The walking bridge that crossed the dam to the old brick Barton Powerhouse on the opposite bank was more daunting than I thought it would be, and I clutched my Kodak floatie, as if it might protect more than my camera in the case of immersion. People who cross this bridge are held by panels of chain link and a metal railing, a barrier which provided, paradoxically, a sense of security and a reminder that imbalanced movements might mean injury or death. Between my hightops, water rushed, and I could see what could happen if I fell over the edge.
From above, the view of the dam, its sluices, the cascade, and the pool below, wasn’t more spectacular than from below, yet the fact that I was standing above the dam couldn’t leave my mind. I was standing above rushing water—perhaps 500 cubic feet a second—upon a hundred-year-old structure that held me and a river simultaneously. I imagined how hard I would hit the pool below if I fell from that height, not to scare myself but to understand the magnitude of the force the passage of water makes on its way down, the gravitational potential energy inherent to water and elevation change. And though this force becomes its maximum just before the water reaches the lower reservoir, enough of the force passes through the 900 kilowatt turbine in the short journey from the top to the bottom that the dam as a whole generates 4.2 million kilowatt hours of energy per year.
I had been researching dams. I understood that, in order to generate electricity through water power, there needed to be some mechanism that allowed the water to flow powerfully and intentionally in one direction. The easiest way to force the water one way was either through natural changes in elevation or by constructed flow from one body of water that was higher than another body of water below. In many cases, a dam is placed right in the middle of a stream, creating a reservoir of water upstream whose surface level would become higher than that of the other body of water downstream. Clearly, this was the case for Barton Dam. The challenge is that water seeks low places, so dams become useful in creating distinct water levels for which gravity and pressure are harnessed to push the water downward.
Even when contained, the water was still so many different things. The colors of it falling from each section of the dam were different, from green to yellow to white to muddy black, and there were sporadic flickers of blue. One of the most blaring issues within Michigan and the Great Lakes region is the increasing amount of rainfall due to climate change. Over the last 50 years, rainfall in the Midwest during the four wettest days of the year has increased about 35 percent. This increase in rainfall challenges our expectations for temperatures and weather patterns during the four seasons that we experience in Michigan. This increase in rainfall also places monumental strain on 53 of the dams existing in Michigan today, all of which were constructed within the last century and bear the increasing possibility of failure every day that the climate is changing. For these 53 individual locations in Michigan, this conflict between aging infrastructural technology and intensified weather patterns across the entire region poses a risk to our lives through dam failures and the flooding that follows.
In Michigan, there are dozens of dams; on this stretch of the Huron River, there are four. Though experts warn of the failure risks that come with dams constructed in stream habitats, Barton Dam works in close coordination with Argo Dam, Geddes Dam, and Superior Dam to regulate the water levels of the Huron River Watershed branches that pass through the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti regions. In other words, the City of Ann Arbor continues using the structures put in place decades ago to prevent one of them from failing—a possibility sometimes tragically miscalculated by local governments and companies.
Many hydroelectric dams throughout Michigan and throughout the Great Lakes region have complex stories similar to Ann Arbor’s dams. The infrastructure was built to provide the water-rich region with renewable energy, but the infrastructure is still at risk of collapsing on itself when the volume of the water it holds back becomes too much, and the infrastructure is at risk of devastating communities and habitats downstream as a result. Failing water level regulation in dam reservoirs are a main cause of dam failures, and yet, our infrastructure will soon reach a point where even regulation cannot prevent its failures: there will simply be too much water.
And so the question persists: how do we prevent the consequences of a dam failure while continuing to use outdated yet functional infrastructure to provide energy for our everyday lives?
As a community member and a self-proclaimed steward of societal sustainability, I generally always believe that the show must go on in the name of renewable energy, that some of our choices must be sacrificed and that every detail of every construction project, retrofitting initiative, or restoration effort must be addressed with the intention to prevent our world from becoming uninhabitable in the future. Yet, as I stood over Barton Dam and felt the immense power of the water beneath my feet, I thought of my university and the town of Ann Arbor, both in the river’s flood plain, and I felt differently. We shouldn’t continue using infrastructure that poses major risks to others if it fails.
A clear example of the risks of old infrastructure are the 2020 dam failures in Central Michigan. The Edenville Dam and Sanford Dam both gave way in May 2020 during a transfer of ownership between authorities, draining Wixom Lake and Sanford Lake respectively and flooding a large portion of Midland County. And yet, there’s no clear way—geologically, logistically, politically—to change what is already put in place. We may construct infrastructure that contains the water, but there is no controlling the water’s nature. This is the issue I had come to Barton Dam to contemplate.
With relief, I reached the end of the dam’s bridgeway and solid ground. I walked down the hill by the powerhouse—a designated historical landmark. At the bottom there was a convenient concrete portage that stepped right down to the water and gave a perfectly breathtaking view of the rushing water from the dam. Instead of nestling there, I took a picnic table that was out of the way of kayak-launchers and couples taking pictures on the portage. The picnic table was placed in a nice spot beneath the trees and it gave a great surface for writing.
On paper, I wrote what became this field note, hoping to make sense of this challenge that existed with the magnitude of the power supplied by the dam manifesting in good and bad ways. In one eye, the dam harvested energy we need to live, and did so renewably, without further pollution to the surrounding environment. In the other eye, the dam’s existence and placement in the middle of a stream habitat posed the risk of an overwhelming disaster that would destroy the very environment it was built to protect. The sheer number of dams in Michigan only amplifies both of these benefits and consequences further, creating an even greater divide in the spectrum of solutions that we can make for our society to prosper. And so the question remains: what is left for us to do? For myself, the fact that we have the privilege to ponder the options of what to do is enough for me to push that something, anything, needs to be done. We have a choice for how we want to write the story of the lives of our dams, we just need to write it.