Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Flat Rock, MI

Flat Rock is a city in the Downriver area of Wayne County, Michigan — with a small sliver in Monroe County — about 23 miles southwest of downtown Detroit, on the banks of the Huron River.

Flat Rock's Monroe County sliver exists because the county line follows the course the Huron River took in 1923, before the river's channel shifted.

Before American settlement, the site was a Wyandot settlement and reservation that was still functioning in 1830, and French travelers called the area 'Grosse Roche' for the great limestone outcrop on the river's south side, noted as early as 1798.

Michael Vreeland and his five sons settled here between 1811 and 1820, bought 800 acres, and built the area's first grain and lumber mill; their settlement was called the Village of Vreeland until 1838, when Flat Rock was platted by the Gibraltar and Flat Rock Land Company.

Henry Ford chose Flat Rock for one of his water-powered 'village industries,' opening the Ford Motor Company Lamp Factory in 1923; powered by the new Flat Rock Dam on the Huron River, it made the lamps for Ford's vehicles, employed as many as 1,200 people, and operated until 1950.

The old lamp factory site in Flat Rock is now marked by a Michigan state historical marker.

Flat Rock incorporated as a village in 1923 and as a city in 1965.

On January 25, 1979, Flat Rock entered technological history when foundry worker Robert Williams was struck and killed by a robotic arm at Ford's Michigan Casting Center — the first known case of a human being killed by a robot.

The casting center site, opened in 1972, later became the Flat Rock Assembly Plant: Mazda opened an assembly plant there in 1987 — the first Japanese auto plant in the American industrial heartland — Ford retook full control in 2012, and the plant builds the Ford Mustang.

In 2021, a benzene leak from the Ford plant into Flat Rock's sewers forced roughly 1,100 evacuations in the city.