Beitner Road’s bridge over the Boardman River collapsed Tuesday, cutting off one of the routes through the heart of the Traverse City flooding response and leaving county crews with a repair job that will likely take six or more months. Grand Traverse County Road Commission manager Dan Watkins said there is a real chance the road will not reopen until late summer or beyond, while Cass Road will serve as the default bypass for now.
The damage spread fast enough that officials were still assessing how to keep traffic moving Wednesday. Temporary signals may be installed on both ends of Hartman Road on US-31 and Cass, while South Airport Road could reopen within a week if its structure proves stable. That road carries roughly 40,000 cars a day in the affected stretch, making the overnight effort to hold it together one of the most important moves in the response.
Crews deployed sandbags and saved South Airport Road from possible collapse by Logan’s Landing Tuesday night, Watkins said, using his word, to “save” the road before the water could take it out. Elsewhere, portions of Sawyer Road, Marsh Road, Bush Road, Rahe Road and Hannah Road were closed as the flooding kept working through the local network.
The bridge failure was not a surprise in one sense. Beitner Road was already scheduled for a bridge replacement, but work was not supposed to begin until 2027, and GTCRC is now trying to accelerate final design so construction can start as soon as possible. Cass Road was also set for reconstruction this year between South Airport and the Cass bridge, but that project is likely to be delayed, too.
Downtown, the water kept testing the city’s infrastructure in a different way. FishPass continued to take on more water during the flooding, but City Manager Benjamin Marentette said experts on the engineering and design team checked the site and found that “everything is intact. We’re hopeful that remains the case.” He said if it had not held, “we would have likely seen catastrophic circumstances in downtown Traverse City.”
That warning was reinforced by a sinkhole that opened in the 100 block alley of Front Street near the river retaining wall and swallowed a section of sidewalk and a light pole. The episode showed how close the city came to a broader downtown failure, and it left crews facing not only road closures but the question of how much hidden damage the water still found. For Traverse City, the immediate answer is already clear: the flooding has rewritten the summer commute, and the hardest repairs are only beginning.
