Michigan Floods Reveal Critical Gaps in Rural Preparedness

When Tom and Diane Peterman moved to their retirement home on the shores of Black Lake in northern Michigan 14 years ago, they tried to buy flood insurance. They were told it wasn’t available. John Solum, who purchased a 1940s-era cabin on the same lake, was informed he wasn’t in a flood zone. Then this spring, historic floods swept through the region, swamping homes, washing out roads, and pushing dams to the brink of failure — leaving thousands of residents like the Petermans and Solum without financial protection and, in many cases, without any warning they were at risk.

According to AP News, the disaster exposed vulnerabilities that extend far beyond Michigan, highlighting critical gaps in how the nation assesses flood risk, maps danger zones, and prepares rural communities for a climate-altered future.

A Flood Without Precedent

The flooding, which struck in April 2026, followed a winter of extremes. A massive March snowstorm dumped 2 to 4 feet of snow across northern Michigan. When record April rainfall arrived on top of the melting snowpack, waterways, dams, and culverts were overwhelmed. At its peak, 40 of Michigan’s 83 counties were under a state of emergency.

Black Lake, a popular summer and retiree destination straddling Cheboygan and Presque Isle counties, was hit particularly hard. Water levels rose so high that floating ice broke apart decks and crashed through windows. Entire sections of M-451 and West Heythaler Highway were washed away. The Beitner Road bridge in Grand Traverse County collapsed into the swollen Boardman River. The Detroit News reported that the Cheboygan Dam reached 5.28 inches below its crest — the highest level ever recorded — as crews scrambled to add pumps, sandbags, and aqua dams to prevent a catastrophic failure.

“We’ve never seen anything like that. Never,” Solum told AP News, describing knee-high floodwater that forced his family to tear out flooring, drywall, furniture, and appliances.

The Mapping Gap

At the heart of the crisis is a fundamental problem: the Federal Emergency Management Agency has not developed flood plain maps for many of the rural areas that were inundated. About two-thirds of the country’s streams, rivers, and coastlines remain unmapped by FEMA, according to the Association of State Floodplain Managers.

Black Lake itself illustrates the disparity. The portion in Cheboygan County has a 2012 FEMA flood plain map. The portion in Presque Isle County — where most areas have never been mapped — does not. Diane Peterman told AP News she tried buying flood insurance three times but was told she couldn’t, even though her township participates in the National Flood Insurance Program. “They said, ‘You’re not in a flood zone’ and I said, ‘But I live on a lake,’” she recalled.

FEMA’s maps are based on the risk of rivers and streams overflowing their banks. But they do not account for flooding caused strictly by increasingly heavy rainfall overwhelming infrastructure — a critical blind spot in an era of climate change. First Street Foundation, a research organization, found more than twice the number of properties at significant flood risk nationwide after incorporating rainfall data into its models, including four times more properties in Michigan.

“I couldn’t believe it when we first started building our model how different we were from FEMA,” Jeremy Porter, chief economist at First Street, told AP News. “Federal maps are missing a whole source of flooding.”

Insurance: A System That Fails Rural Residents

Even when maps exist, the insurance system has significant gaps. Communities must participate in the National Flood Insurance Program before homeowners can buy federally backed policies. Several hundred Michigan communities have never joined, said Matthew Occhipinti, the state’s NFIP coordinator.

But participation alone doesn’t guarantee accurate information. The Detroit Free Press reported that state officials urged residents to report damage through an online tool as they assessed the scope of the disaster. For many, the damage was uninsured. An average NFIP policy costs about $1,000 for $250,000 in coverage, but that coverage simply wasn’t available or known to many rural homeowners.

Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said communities often get a false sense of security from FEMA’s National Risk Index, which assumes no flood risk if a community lacks a flood plain map. “FEMA flood maps should always be the beginning of the journey and not the end,” he told AP News. “Maybe states and communities need to step up and lead a little bit more.”

Climate Change: The New Normal

Scientists are clear that this was not a freak event. Michigan experienced what is known as a 100-year flood — a 1% chance in any given year — across many areas. But as Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist, explained, such labels are misleading.

“We call these storms historic; that is only true compared to the past,” Rood told AP News. “I think it is more appropriate to consider it typical of the climate of the future.”

Michigan and neighboring Wisconsin experienced their wettest March 1 to April 15 period on record. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture for longer periods, and an extraordinarily warm Gulf of Mexico set the stage for both heavy snow and intense rain in the upper Midwest.

FEMA’s Capacity Under Strain

Concerns about FEMA’s ability to address these challenges have deepened following significant staffing losses. The agency lost close to 20% of its total workforce in 2025, including about 25% of its permanent and most senior staff, according to a Government Accountability Office report. Christopher Currie, who audits FEMA for the GAO, told AP News the agency was chronically understaffed even before the cuts and now faces difficult choices about resource allocation.

The estimated cost to fully map the country’s flood risk stands at $4 billion to $12 billion — funding FEMA has never had. A 2012 congressional mandate to create new maps in rural areas has seen little progress.

What Comes Next

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who toured the damaged regions, described the situation bluntly. “We are in crisis mode now; recovery mode will take additional work,” she said, as reported by the Detroit News. “We’re grappling with a new moment — 100-year-old infrastructure is not up to this moment, no matter where you live in this country.”

State Sen. John Damoose, R-Harbor Springs, called the flooding “a slow-motion disaster that is still unfolding.” Evacuations were ordered near Black Lake, and an emergency shelter opened at Belknap Township Hall in Presque Isle County, according to CBS Detroit.

The disaster raises urgent questions: Will FEMA update its mapping methodology to account for rainfall-driven flooding? Can Congress fund nationwide flood mapping? And will states step up where the federal government has fallen short?

For residents like Diane Peterman, the answers can’t come soon enough. As she sorted through waterlogged belongings outside her Black Lake home, the lesson was painfully clear: living on a lake does not guarantee you know the risk — and the systems meant to protect you may not have your back.

“You should never be lulled into complacency that we just had the big flood so we’re good for another 100 years,” Berginnis warned. “Mother Nature does not obey statistical averages.”