Rerouted water began reaching Oakland County communities struggling with a major water main break, easing water-use restrictions on Tuesday, May 12. But local officials in Orion Township, the village of Lake Orion and northern Auburn Hills noted the situation was not yet resolved and urged residents to continue to curb water use to assist the process.
“We are exponentially ahead of the horrible schedule we laid out” of two weeks before a full restoration of water service, Orion Township Supervisor Chris Barnett said Tuesday.
“You can take a shower again — a military shower,” he said. A military shower is a water-saving technique where the water is run only to wet down and rinse off, and is turned off while soaping and shampooing, usually taking less than two minutes of total running time.
Officials also lifted restrictions on businesses late Monday, except for water-intensive operations such as car washes and certain manufacturers. Officials were urging restaurants to operate as takeout-only to start.
The segment of the 42-inch water main that failed early Sunday beneath River Woods Park in Auburn Hills, off Squirrel Road south of M-59 highway, has been replaced with a new segment that has since been filled with water, pressure-checked with the welds holding, Great Lakes Water Authority CEO Suzanne Coffey said.
Water authority staff hope to have water running to affected community residents at normal pressures “sometime Thursday,” Coffey said, though the boil-water restrictions in place will likely continue into early next week. Remaining steps include the local municipal water systems flushing the system through hydrants, completion of bacteriological testing of the water, and coordinating the connected systems to bring the pressure back to normal, she said.
Lake Orion Community Schools officials extended school closures in the affected area through at least Thursday.
“We still don’t have pressure through the main line,” Barnett said. Emergency routing of water through Pontiac to the area filled the Orion Township water tower “a bit” Monday night, he said.
“We are in decent shape this morning, but we don’t have enough information to say that schools can open yet,” Barnett said. “It’s not just about the porta-johns; it’s about life safety systems; fire suppression systems.”
Local leaders praised residents for heeding the call to restrict water usage throughout the crisis.
“We put out the call to limit the water use, emergency water use restrictions were placed on the water, and the entire city answered the call,” Auburn Hills Mayor Eugene Hawkins III said. “That certainly got us to where we are today and helped us get the system to where we are at this point.”
Why did a pipe with a 100-year life fail after only 50 years?
The removed section of water main will be sent out for expert analysis to determine why it failed. Coffey told the Free Press on Monday that the pre-stressed concrete cylinder pipe, or PCCP, was installed in 1975 and was designed to last 100 years — yet failed after only 50 years.
“This is a highly engineered pipe; it shouldn’t be breaking like this,” she said Tuesday. “We’ve seen it here; we’ve seen it elsewhere.”
A 48-inch water main break on 14 Mile Road in Farmington Hills on March 7 left residents in Novi and Walled Lake temporarily without water and, later on, with a boil-water advisory. That segment of failed PCCP pipe had been inspected five years earlier with “zero defects; no evidence of degradation,” Coffey said, potentially indicating that these types of pipes can lose their integrity quickly.
“What we are seeing now is that we are going to have to have more attention on these types of pipes,” Coffey said.
Great Lakes Water Authority has 80 miles of PCCP mains in its 800-mile system. Just replacing all of it quickly isn’t economically feasible, Coffey said. It would cost $20 million per mile, or $1.6 billion to replace it all.
But beyond potential PCCP pipe issues, 16% of the pipes in the authority’s system are past their useful life, she said.
“There has been underinvestment in our aging infrastructure,” Coffey said.
Contact Keith Matheny: kmatheny@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Orion Twp. restaurants reopen as water crisis begins to improve
Reporting by Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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