Detroit officials are vowing to cover all uninsured repairs to homes in a southwest Detroit neighborhood after a massive water main broke early Monday and caused such severe flooding that residents had to be rescued by boats, on the shoulders of firefighters and, in one instance, the scoop on a front-end loader.
Residents in the area of Beard and Rowan streets were startled when they heard a loud bang at about 2 a.m. Monday. It was the sound of a 54-inch steel water transmission main rupturing in the subfreezing temperatures.
By 4 a.m., the city recognized it was a huge water transmission line owned by the Great Lakes Water Authority that had been buried underground in the 1930s. By 7:30 a.m., workers found the leak and began shutting off valves. An hour later the water began to recede, but the damage was done.
“There are very few houses where it doesn’t have water,” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said during an afternoon press conference at police headquarters. “Most of the water main breaks … are a small break on the water main line and you see a whole block go down. That didn’t happen here. This was a main transmission line. The lines, with exception of three blocks today, were still intact.
“This issue will not be restoring water, it will be a question of how fast we can replace furnaces.”
Water and ice as deep as 5 feet in an area running from west to east from Central Street to Beard Street — and north to south from Rowan Street to West Lafayette Boulevard — encroached on homes and made rescues difficult. Workers from Wayne, Oakland and Macomb County agencies helped with the evacuations.
Members of the Downriver Dive Team evacuated adults and children by inflatable boats through the water and ice on Green and Army streets. Some were transferred from inflatable crafts to the back of a Detroit Police Department truck, which also helped to get some residents out of the flooded area in frigid temperatures.
By early afternoon, officials said 54 adults, 22 children and 12 pets had been rescued. One person with breathing issues was transported to a hospital, but that was the only medical issue reported.
Duggan said 14 people were being temporarily sheltered and will be moved to Sonesta Extended Stay Hotels. Affected residents across the neighborhood — and their pets — will be able to stay there until they can comfortably return to their homes, the mayor said. They will be fed. Some residents did not lose power or heat and chose to stay at their homes, Duggan said.
Duggan: ‘We’re gonna fix this’
Megan Gibson, 32, has lived her entire life on Lexington Street. On Monday afternoon, she moved drenched carpet and other damaged items outside of her house.
“There’s so much pressure from the water. The pipes are messed up and now people are left to pay for all this,” Gibson said. “These people are poor over here. It’s low-income over here.”
But Duggan said residents like her will be compensated for any uninsured repairs such as new furnaces or water heaters, with the cost being split between the GLWA and the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. He said the arrangement will speed repairs rather than going through the bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“There’s no act of nature in this case. This was a failure of a Detroit-built … water main. That’s the truth, and we’re gonna fix it,” Duggan said.
The city is uncertain of the cost of repairs and the amount of aid that will be necessary, he said.
The city has set up a call-line — (313) 774-5261 — where residents can call for assistance available until 8 p.m. Monday. The mayor said it would become a 24/7 line starting Tuesday, if not before then. That’s the number that residents can call if they need a place to stay, furnaces or water heaters replaced, or a vehicle was flooded and they need a free Uber lift to work.
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Interim Police Chief Todd Bettison said at the press conference that officers were on the scene as early as 2:17 a.m. and began to knock on doors to alert residents of the water main break and ask them to locate and remove vehicles off the street if needed. Police officers were still on scene as of 2 p.m. Monday, Bettison said.
Vehicles that are still stranded will be towed to the Detroit Police Department’s 4th Precinct where drivers can retrieve them at no cost.
Detroit Sewerage and Water Department Director Gary Brown told the mayor this was the worst water main break he had ever seen.
“It took a couple of hours for us to find valves that were covered with ice and snow to be able to isolate, shut off the water, and identify exactly what went wrong,” Brown said. He also said aging infrastructure played a role in the water main break as well as the cold temperatures, noting that younger pipelines have broken before when the ground shifts during freezing temperatures.
GLWA: Break unlikely preventable
When officials were questioned about whether the main break was preventable, they indicated it wasn’t possible given how the infrastructure was originally built.
“We systematically go through these pipes…,” Great Lakes Water Authority CEO Suzanne Coffey said. “The brilliant engineers who designed these systems designed them to be closed intentionally, so it’s challenging for us to get in and do inspections.
“Was it preventable?” she asked. “Not likely. As assets age, that doesn’t mean we don’t work everyday to try to get ahead of these things.”
The authority, which took over controlling the city’s huge mains when it was created in 2014 during Detroit’s emergence from bankruptcy, could not confirm Monday when the break would be entirely fixed.
Crews from the Van Buren Fire and Rescue, Oakland County Search and Rescue, Grosse Ile Fire Department, Shelby Fire and Rescue, Chesterfield Township Police Department, the Wayne County Department of Homeland Security, DTE Energy and Wayne County Underwater Search and Rescue were on site assisting the city’s Department of Sewerage and Water, police and fire crews as well as local residents who offered their own hands like Lisa Shaw and Andy Didorosi.
The couple who live on Detroit’s east side in Jefferson Chalmers arrived around noon Monday at the site on West Lafayette Boulevard, where police blocked vehicles from entering at Central Street, to offer water equipment and coffee to crews and affected residents.
“We saw the helicopter footage. It looked like a Biblical disaster, just blocks and blocks of water up to your waist, so we figured we could come down and offer coffee, a hand, a boat,” said Didorosi, 38. “We’re no strangers to flooding. Jefferson Chalmers, we have floods all the time.
“The big flood was 2021 when the sewer pumps failed. That was huge. … All of our basements filled full of sewage,” he said, adding that he owns boats, pumps and other equipment to aid the crews.
Shaw said: “I can’t imagine waking up at 3 a.m. in this weather and having your house be flooded,” she said.
The bright side in this case, Brown said, is that the flooding was water instead of sewage, which makes the clean-up easier.
Monday’s incident follows a series of water main breaks last month as temperatures fell far below freezing.
In January, a few dozen breaks occurred across Detroit’s 3,000 miles of water main when temperatures dropped below the teens. During a Jan. 22 news conference, Sam Smalley, deputy director of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, said the number of breaks that happen during severely cold weather is double to triple to what they typically experienced in the winter.
The Detroit water system has perhaps five or six breaks a day during the winter, but when temperatures drop far below freezing, the system can experience 15 to 20 plus breaks in a day, Smalley said. Repairs usually take longer in severely cold weather, a point that Brown emphasized during the press conference but said city workers could overcome.
Temperatures on Monday hovered near 20 degrees, according to the National Weather Service website. The average high for Feb. 17 is 36 degrees, weather service records show.
The weather service predict the temperature lows will remain in the single digits Tuesday, with wind chills projected to fall below zero.
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