There was no warning before the water started to rise.

In the pre-dawn hours of Sunday May 10, a 42-inch water line ruptured at River Woods Park in Auburn Hills. Thousands of households in Auburn Hills, Orion Township, and the village of Lake Orion faced boil-water mandates. Schools closed, and safe drinking water stations were set up. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared a disaster. Orion Township Supervisor Chris Barnett warned, “This is not a drill” and told residents to take the situation seriously.

The May incident was the latest manifestation of a problem for which there is no quick or easy solution. Southeast Michigan’s underground infrastructure — water, sewer and stormwater lines — is aging. Most of the water lines in the city of Detroit are already over 90 years old, well beyond their planned service life.

But money to upgrade the systems throughout the metro area remains hard to come by. Federal grants that helped build the network of underground infrastructure decades ago have long since dried up. And unlike potholes or downed utility lines that are painfully obvious and require immediate fixes, the buried nature of the underground problem makes it hard for the public to get excited — until a broken pipe floods a neighborhood.

There is, of course, constant maintenance and upgrades of metro Detroit’s underground network, work that across multiple agencies totals hundreds of millions of dollars a year cleaning and replacing aging pipes.

But much more money, certainly multiple billions of dollars, would be needed to upgrade the whole system. And that money is just not there.

Michigan’s water systems face up to $85 billion in water infrastructure needs over the next two decades for more than 1,300 water systems, according to a recent study conducted by Public Sector Consultants and commissioned by the GLWA as pipes deteriorate.

“There’s a huge funding gap, and we’ve got to figure out a way to start to take some bites at it,” said Suzanne Coffey, CEO of the regional Great Lakes Water Authority. “We are trying hard to figure out the systemic funding problem, but at the same time, the pipes still age every single year. So it’s a tough battle, right? It gets worse every year on one hand, and we’re working hard on the other hand to get ahead of it.”

How did we get here?

Southeast Michigan saw runaway growth both in the early 1900s as the auto industry grew and in the post-World War II years as suburbs boomed. Much of the region’s underground water and sewer lines date from those periods.

Federal grants paid for most of the work, at least 60% of the cost by most estimates, but now federal money accounts for less than 10% of the cost to upgrade the system. Cash to make repairs and replace aging infrastructure comes from a patchwork of local money, state grants, bond sales, and the like, but there’s never enough. “Decades of underinvestment have led to kind of where we are now,” said Kelly Karll, manager of environment and infrastructure for the regional planning agency SEMCOG.

Plenty of upgrading work does get done. Across multiple agencies including GLWA, Detroit Water & Sewerage, Michigan Department of Transportation, and others, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent each year cleaning, replacing, and otherwise dealing with aging underground pipes.

But given how limited funding is today, the work often means reacting when something blows up. Or as Karll of SEMCOG said, “Almost everything is a Band-Aid.”

Why old pipes fail

Urban water and sewer systems are complex networks that carry fresh water into homes and businesses and carry away waste as well as rain and snowmelt. Throughout metro Detroit, millions of homes and businesses connect to these below-ground pipes.

The aging infrastructure is prone to a variety of problems. Pipes corrode over time or get clogged with debris. Joints where pipes join may be particularly vulnerable. Then, too, today’s more intense rainstorms dump far more water into the network than the pipes were designed to handle. And sometimes clueless digging by contractors can damage pipes.

Out of sight often means out of mind. A few years ago, a study by SEMCOG found that perhaps a third of underground pipes were in poor shape. As GLWA’s Coffey said, “It’s hard to get public support because nobody can see our assets; they’re below ground.”

So the problem just gets worse. At the same time, the public’s expectation of service is rising as more pipes break and flooding happens.

“A lot of our current public works managers, water infrastructure experts, kind of inherited this problem that keeps growing year after year, decade after decade, due to the investments needed to maintain improvement,” Karll said.

Coffey agreed.

“Civil engineers years ago just thought there would be enough money that when these pipes aged out, you would just tear them all up and replace them all, and we simply don’t have that money,” she said. “So they were not built with the idea that we would be doing surgical or strategic replacements. It was just wholesale. So now we have to say, what can we do with the money we have to improve the level of service?”

Other priorities

Nor is fixing leaky pipes the only demand places on various water authorities. Replacing tens of thousands of lead pipes connecting to homes is another priority.

“We estimate that we have 70,000 lead service lines, and you can ballpark $10,000 per service line,” said Sam Smalley, deputy director of the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department. “Easy math: $700 million. That would require an annual investment of $58 million just for replacing service lines. We’re putting about $30 million into lead service lines on an annual basis, so there’s a shortfall of about $28 million, but that’s coming from the same money that replaces water mains.”

And more: Guarding against PFAS “forever chemicals” in the water system is another mandate. And as Coffey said, “Keeping charges as low as possible to help those that need or struggle with paying their water bills has been a really high priority.”

All that translates into less money for ever-more-urgent needs.

What’s needed now

Addressing the long-term funding shortfall is a daunting but hopefully not insurmountable task.

Among other possible remedies, state legislators in Lansing have been debating creation of a Water Affordability Fund, a package of bills that would create a statewide meter fee that would support a permanent common fund to provide sustained capital support for aging infrastructure and stormwater systems. The legislation would also provide support and shutoff protections for low-income households.

Such a broad-based funding source is needed, said Gary Brown, director of the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department. As Brown writes in an op-ed accompanying this report, any permanent funding solution cannot rely on just a dwindling number of local households to cover the cost. DWSD will operate as efficiently as possible, “but local discipline cannot overcome an impossible rate-based math problem.”

GLWA’s Coffey agreed and said the solution requires additional federal support as well. Noting that federal money paid originally for much of America’s water infrastructure, she said that rebuilding that water network will take a similar level of national public support.

The report released last week by the GLWA proposed a wide array of funding possibilities, including new state-issued bonds, increasing the state sales tax or expanding it to services, assessing a surcharge on bottled-water companies or dedicating some existing tax revenue to water infrastructure, as the state has done with road funding.

Other ideas

But while waiting for permanent funding solutions, planners are hard at work fixing problems as they arise.

In Detroit, Smalley of Detroit Water & Sewerage said the department replaced 13.6 miles of water main last year, helpful but he said not nearly enough. “I’ve directed our engineering group to make adjustments to get us up to 20 miles minimum per year, and we need to get to 30 miles per year, basically just to break even or tread water,” he said.

Detroit Water & Sewerage, among other agencies, prioritizes where to put efforts to minimize the worst potential damage.

“We have a very robust asset management plan that was developed that is based on risk. We define risk as being the probability of failure times the consequence of failure,” he said. That means that aging pipes near hospitals, dialysis centers, and other places critical to public health will get attention first.

Modern technology can help the agencies keep track what’s going on inside the decades-old pipes. The Detroit agency uses closed-circuit television cameras for pipe inspections and maintenance planning. GLWA and other agencies dealing with very large pipes sometimes use robotic devices resembling turtles with cameras and a sort of radar that snake through the network looking for trouble spots.

And sometimes planners instead of removing an aging pipe will insert a new pipe with a slightly smaller diameter through the old one, a more cost-effective solution. “We basically scrub it out, scrape it out on the inside using robotic tools, get it shiny bright on the inside, and then put a new liner inside of it that actually provides its own structural strength,” Smalley said. “The old pipe is simply acting as a form to get the new liner in place.”

Meanwhile, agencies from GLWA to the Michigan Department of Transportation are cooperating to find ways to reduce stormwater flooding. Floodwaters can be directed from a burdened pipe system to one with greater capacity through a network of gates and pumps. And MDOT has been upgrading its pumps along local highways to better move excessive rainfall to keep roadways clear.

How AI can help

Today’s new artificial intelligence systems may help in two ways.

One is understanding where the next line break may occur. Planners already try to estimate where the most likely failures may occur and how damaging they could be. But powerful AI programs can do an analysis based on numerous scenarios dealing with age of the pipes, their material, soil composition, weather patterns, history and more.

“I think one of the best places that this advanced artificial intelligence could help us is in risk modeling,” GLWA’s Coffey said. “These great technology-type solutions can run millions of scenarios. It can take in all this data, and it can help us to understand the risk.”

The other potential gain from AI is in how underground pipes are designed and made. Ali Abolmaali, dean of the James and Patricia Anderson College of Engineering at Wayne State University, believes AI can help develop new materials to enhance the strength and durability of underground pipes to achieve a service life exceeding 200 years. That would be three or four times the expected service life of today’s underground network.

“The majority of the cities or water authorities, they’re using conventional material that we used hundreds of years ago, either concrete or steel or cast iron or brick, right? Artificial intelligence can guide us to develop new materials,” he said.

Abolmaali has already done considerable research into the possibilities in AI and has established a state-of-the-art robotic laboratory at Wayne State University to work on new uses in the field.

How wetlands help

Today’s more intensive rainstorms pose a particular problem for pipes that carry away stormwater. Put simply, engineers designed and built underground infrastructure for rainfall typical of half a century ago. Today’s storms dump copious amounts of rain into a network of pipes that were never designed to handle that much water.

So another solution getting a lot of attention sees planners turning to a tactic both old and new.

Natural wetlands, sometimes called green stormwater infrastructure or GSI, may be as old as nature but creating new ones is an approach to dealing with excessive rainfall. Agencies are creating new storage basins that drain or retain excessive rainwater. Natural systems including planting more native trees and plants soak up water. Wetlands, natural or human-made, also filter pollutants that otherwise would run off pavements into the underground pipes and require more work to clean it.

“Wetlands are like there for a purpose,” Karll from SEMCOG said. “You’re doing green infrastructure, rain gardens, or smaller techniques managing runoff from a parking lot, say bioswales or other expanded wetlands.”

All the other problems

Of course, aging pipes in the ground are competing for attention and dollars with much more visible issues: affordable housing, better childcare, fixing roads and upgrading public transit, among so much else.

So while water engineers prioritize which aging pipes to replace this year, they also suggest the broader question of how a society should tend to its critical systems, especially those that are less visible but no less important.

“There’s a lot of considerations going into it,” Smalley said. “The bottom line is we’re trying to put as much money into the street, into the buried assets, as we possibly can.”

Read the article at Crain's Detroit Business.