In the early hours of June 17, 2018, almost seven inches of rain pummeled Houghton, Michigan, washing sediment and debris down ravines and creeks to Lake Superior. 

Rachael Pressley had worked for a month for the Western Upper Peninsula Planning & Development Region (WUPPDR) when the Father’s Day flood hit. “There was waist high deep sediment in front of my desk,” Pressley said. The WUPPDR office was “taken out” by the floodwaters.

This 1,000-year flood caused about $30 million in damage, mostly in Houghton County. The flood affected more than 100 roadways and more than 600 homes, about 75 of which sustained significant damage.

Pressley is a planner. As she and her co-workers cleaned up debris and the soggy remains of their work, she was already thinking about how to be prepared for the next disaster.

Pressley coordinated updates to mitigation and emergency management plans for the six Western U.P. counties and Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC). “Because we hadn’t had a disaster, it hadn’t been a priority to make sure those plans were up-to-date,” she said.

She also came together with partners including the Keweenaw Community Foundation to plan for the unique challenges of the remote Upper Peninsula. Copper Harbor at the tip of the peninsula is the farthest community from an interstate in the continental United States.

“We’re 100 miles from a population of 25,000 and four hours’ drive from a population of over 80,000,” Pressley said. 

Robin Meneguzzo brings her experience as a family nurse practitioner to her role as executive director of the community foundation. “Doing rescue in a space like this one, there’s not cell service, so it’s not an easy way for people to contact for emergency needs,” she said. “That really creates the need to be thinking about how we maintain emergency service.”

Meneguzzo, Pressley and others want to prepare for the worst. “We brought together people who are really concerned about this challenge to problem solve and say, ‘OK, what would it take? What do we need? What are the biggest issues? What do want the future to look like?’” Meneguzzo said.

Together, they developed an application for a $20-million Community Change Grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “We really need a centralized place where the equipment and the volunteer training can happen,” Meneguzzo said.

Their Community Change grant application coupled an emergency response center with 13 other projects to bolster emergency management and disaster preparedness across the U.P. But after making final revisions earlier this year, “everything stopped,” Pressley said.

With federal funding cuts halting momentum for hazard resilience in the Western U.P., planners and community leaders are trying to piece together money for projects to safeguard their rural communities.

“The economic impacts for not funding these plans at the level that is required is devastating for the community,” Pressley said. “We could see losses in infrastructure, losses in life, losses of land access, losses on coastal or coastline access. We see losses of habitat. The economic impacts are kind of a cascading effect.” 

As Meneguzzo thinks of how they’ll plan next, she draws on the “closeness and the resilience” necessary among people who live in a remote area. Pressley looks to the Upper Peninsula that she loves.

“This area has always been resilient,” she said. “We have the expansiveness of Lake Superior. We have the incredible, delicate nature of so many rare plants here. We have the resilience of the seeds that still germinate after 300 inches of snow and six months of winter. This place is resilient and abundant in its core.”