OCEANA COUNTY, Mich. — Since early summer the Village of Pentwater has been cut in half, with a road closure leaving many residents with a nine-mile detour to get to town, shops, and school.
The Oceana County Road Commission closed a short section of Longbridge Road to traffic on May 1. Water from Pentwater Lake has covered the road ever since that day.
On some days, there's as much as eight inches of water covers the road. Still, some community members want the barricades and detour signs to be removed.
"They should open it up," said a resident of Pentwater George Kazemier. Kazemier said over the years drivers have been allowed to use the road even with water on the road.
“There’s no reason why they had to do what they did,” Kazemier said. “We would just drive over it slow and they'd put signs up."
Oceana County Road Commission Managing Director Mark Timmer said allowing drivers to use the flooded road would be irresponsible and dangerous.
"There’s terrible liability,” Timmer said. “And even beyond that, it’s the moral duty to protect people and keep them safe."
Critics say Timmer and the road commission’s board should have made preventative efforts last year or this spring to keep water from getting to the road.
They point to forecasts by the Army Corps of Engineers that called for high water on Lake Michigan in 2019. Pentwater Lake is connected to Lake Michigan, and water levels on both lakes are connected.
"A lot of this was known a year or two ago," said Mark Trierweiler, organizer of the Open Longbridge Road Now community action group.
Members of the group have attended the last two road commission board meetings to voice concerns. Community members don’t like the longer drive to Pentwater, but Trierweiler says many have a greater concern the detour's impact on response times for police, fire, and ambulance services.
"Emergency help is 30 minutes away and it used to be five," Trierweiler said.
The Oceana County Road Commission Board voted Wednesday to allocate $200,000 to begin repairing Longbride Road plus an additional $100,000 for engineering work.
Work may begin as early as October. Timmer says the working plan is to put down a geo-fabric material, then cover it will fill material. The fabric would be wrapped, “like a burrito,” Timmer said. And a lawyer of additional aggregate would cover the wrap so a new road surface could be built about two feet above the existing road. “To alleviate the possibility that the road would ever flood in the future," Timmer said.
The project timeline would need to be short if Longbridge is to reopen to traffic in 2019, because asphalt will be needed for the new road surface, and in West Michigan asphalt plants close in mid-November.
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