Detroit water infrastructure is crumbling; many lack access to water

The Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and the Sierra Club have teamed up this week over at Great Lakes Town Hall to examine the human and environmental cost of Detroit’s deteriorating water infrastructure. What they describe is not pretty.

In 2007, Maureen Taylor of MWRO reports, 45,000 Detroit households suffered water shutoffs. While some of these houses were already abandoned, many were homes to people who could not afford to pay their water bills. Children have been removed from their homes and place in foster care because their families could not afford to keep the water on, Taylor says, and the city now adds unpaid water bills to property tax bills, making it even harder for those struggling to avoid foreclosure. Taylor says her group is working on organizing a ballot proposal to create a water affordability plan that would protect low-income people, seniors and the disabled from water shut-offs.

On the macro scale, the Detroit sewer system processes up to a billion gallons of municipal and industrial waste water each day, Melissa Damaschke of the Sierra Club reports, and heavy rainfall or melting snow frequently overwhelm the system, causing sewage overflows that damage the Great Lakes. The high cost of upgrading and expanding the aging sewage system, she writes, has forced the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to raise its water rates numerous times in recent years so that water — a basic human right — has become unaffordable to many residents.