Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan says the city hopes to move from emergency response mode to “repair and restoration" mode after a massive water main break.
The 54-inch transmission pipe burst in the early hours of Monday morning, unleashing a torrent of icy water that impacted nearly 400 homes in Southwest Detroit. A number of those residents are still without power or heat, Duggan said on Tuesday.
The city is offering impacted residents temporary shelter in hotels, but Duggan estimated that around 60% of them have chosen to stay in their homes.
“We have 190 houses with basement flooding, and 174 with no heat,” he said. “Obviously, those two numbers are heavily correlated. The basement flooding put the furnaces out.”
The mayor said Buildings and Safety Department inspectors are already hitting the streets to assess damage and what repairs may be needed, with emergency contractors expected to start work next week. But Duggan said getting that work started will require residents’ cooperation.
“The contractors cannot come in if you don't have the city inspection complete,” he said. “And so this is something that we cannot help you until you let us in the door.”
Duggan said he believes the city “absolutely has the capacity” to inspect all those homes over the next three days, assuming widespread resident cooperation. But Detroit Water and Sewerage Department head Gary Brown said returning everyone to livable homes will likely take over a month.
“I'm hoping that within the next six weeks we can have all of this behind us with regards to having everyone back in their home,” Brown said. “That's our goal. We're going to shoot for that.”
Crews managed to pinpoint the offending main Monday morning, but were only able to “succeed in shutting off the last bit of flow of water into that hole” late Tuesday morning, Duggan said. The repair operation has only just begun, and was beset by some additional problems, Duggan and Brown noted.
“We had a water main break [Monday] in one of the city lines that had shut off water to three blocks, [or] about 30 houses,” Duggan said. “We aren't going to be able to completely repair it until the main transmission line is fixed. But I do expect to have capped it so that only three or four [households] will be without water very shortly.”
Then, on Monday evening, a gas leak was discovered “right at the site of the collapse,” Duggan said. “They quickly shut off gas flow to the area, but that meant another five folks now are without gas.”
As for the water main itself, “We have isolated the break,” said the Great Lakes Water Authority’s Todd King. “We are beginning the excavation and the cleanup in the immediate vicinity of the break. Once that's completed, and we've exposed the pipe, we will inspect it and determine what the cause of the water main break was.”
King and other officials declined to speculate as to the cause of the break for now, saying it could have been caused by a variety of things. King also said that it would be premature to set a specific timeline for repairs right now.
“Once we get a better idea on what type of break it was and how much of a section of pipe we're going to need to replace, we'll be able to put a better timeline on the overall repairs,” King said. “It's probably at least a week to two weeks of getting that pipe in place and welded up.”
