GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – After two and a half weeks, a trial concerning the historic May 2020 flood has concluded in a Grand Rapids courtroom.
The case involved homeowners who lost their properties and livelihoods due to the flood. Attorney Thomas Waun represented these homeowners, arguing that the state failed to manage water levels behind a dam, leading to its breach. The legal argument centers on the claim that the state effectively took land from property owners without compensation.
“We called several experts in the case,” Waun said. “We had an expert on dam safety. We had an expert on meteorology talking about the rainfall. We had an expert who’s a hydrologist who talked about how the rainfall ended up in the lake and at what level the lake would have been had they started at a lower level before the flood occurred. And we had a geotechnical expert who talked about if the level of lake had been at what was indicated by our hydrologists, that the failure would not have occurred.”…