Snow and low temperatures can be rough on cars at the best of times. An unfortunate conflation of events pushed that to new levels in Michigan earlier this week. As covered by FOX2 Detroit, a burst pipe sent water spewing into the streets, flooding homes and creating an almighty mess in southern Detroit. If that weren’t bad enough, the water then froze solid, trapping trash cans and cars alike.
The incident occurred in the early hours of Monday morning when a 54-inch water main broke at the corner of Rowan and Beard Streets. As a major transmission line, the pipe quickly flooded the area to depths of up to five feet. With temperatures diving as low as 19°F, the flood water soon froze, only exacerbating the damage to the immediate area.
According to the Detroit News, over 400 homes have been affected by the incident, with many having to turn to hotels or otherwise deal with damage to their homes. Meanwhile, the streets were clogged with vehicles trapped by the quickly-solidifying flood.
Footage from the ground has spread across social media, further capturing the devastation. Whole streets full of cars fell victim to the flood, winding up frozen in the ice up to their hoodlines. Many sit, stuck in place, with their wipers raised off the windshield—a preventative measure to avoid damage in the cold that sadly does little against five feet of frozen slush.
The combination of low temperatures and deep flooding rarely occurs together, and the scenes from Detroit are like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie. In wild footage captured by FOX2, one individual had to be rescued as they sat atop the roof of their entrapped vehicle. Authorities lowered a ladder down to the individual, allowing them to climb up to safety rather than risking a walk across the semi-frozen floodwaters.
Footage from the air shows the widespread devastation from the deep-frozen flood.
Regular flood waters will do plenty of damage to a vehicle on their own. They’ll ruin carpets, breed mold, corrode wiring, and destroy electrical components. It’s likely all of that happened to the vehicles impacted by this flood. The fact that the vehicles ended up frozen will only have increased the damage. Water is quite unlike other materials in that it actually expands in size when it freezes. Many of the frozen vehicles will have likely been squeezed somewhat by the ice, causing damage to panels and mechanical components. Insurance write-offs are all but a certainty.
Authorities have noted the unprecedented nature of the event. “I’ve been running [Detroit Water and Sewerage Department] for ten years now, and we’ve never had a water main break this large in a densely populated neighborhood,” director Gary Brown told FOX2. As reported by WXYZ, one of the reasons behind the scale of the damage was that it took authorities several hours to shut the water off. “This was a failure of the water main system,” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan told the outlet. “It took a couple of hours to find the valves that were covered in ice and snow to be able to isolate and shut off the water and identify exactly where the break was.”
Works in the area are ongoing, with authorities advising that the repairs could take at least two weeks. As covered by the Detroit News, Thursday saw a 19-foot length of pipe arrive to the site to replace a 12-foot damaged section of the water main.
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The Great Lakes Water Authority released photos of the damaged section of water main, recovered during repair works.
As covered by FOX2 on Thursday night, cleanup efforts continue across the affected area. Residents were seen removing ruined furniture and belongings from their inundated homes. Residents complained of deep muck and flooded basements, while one particularly mourned his lost collectibles. “I got baseball cards that are old, that are just gone now…” the man told FOX2. “My greatest one that I had was a signed Alan Trammel… gone.”
For now, the flood waters have receded, but the recovery effort continues. Repairs are expected to run well into March as the community recovers from this unprecedented and unexpected event.
Topshot image credits: FOX2 Detroit via YouTube screenshot
Like a good neighbor, your insurance company is declaring an act of God.
Congestion pricing could have avoided all of this.
To add to this situation, this is the mexican town area of Detroit, already targeted by ICE (I could see a joke coming out of this statement). Worst timing ever.
Just trying to to do the calculations of the volume and force of water ejected continuously from a 54-inch water main is pretty crazy.
This happened to me back in 07 in Chicago. Same thing water pipe burst and the street filled up with freezing water. I came out in the morning to go to work and my car was iced in up to about halfway up the doors.
So I called my boss to tell him what what was going on – he didnt believe me and this was back when it was hard to send decent photos via cell phone so i had to take digital pics of my car – upload them to my pc then email him.
Cool enough though a repair worker had a back hoe on the street and saw my plight. He used pinpoint laser accuracy to chip at the ice around my car with the digger – and was able to get me in to the car. Once I was in the car he chipped out the car and i was able to get rolling.
but…..
In my excitement i didnt think of all of the ramifications of driving a thawing ice cube. I got onto Lake Shore drive and hot about 30MPH and OMG THE CAR STARTED SHAKING APART. the ice in the wheel spokes wasnt even, so it was like each wheel had a 2 pound tire weight in.
I had a similar but less severe thing happen to my car in the middle of a series of heavy snowstorms. I was young and didn’t know about the effects of letting slush accumulate in and around the wheels. After a very shaky drive to visit my parents we had to put the car in their garage with heaters on the wheels to get the ice out.
Happened to me, but ony on the rear wheels (sloped driveway, rear wheels got buried by the snowploughs); stayed in the right lane doing about 30 with my handbrake on for a couple of miles, wheels got warm enough to get the ice blocks loose and fall out of the wheels.
I cannot imagine having to deal with this on top of having the flu (which is going around absolutely everywhere on the other side of Michigan right now). You are sitting in bed miserable with chills/nausea/fever/congestion/cough/body aches/etc one evening thinking this is as bad as it gets… and without warning, you now have a flooded basement and no means of transportation to leave even if you did have the energy to do so?
Terrible.
The SE Michigan hospital where I work has had 30-50 patients admitted due to influenza for most of the past few weeks. I heard on NPR this morning that only 24% of Michiganders got their flu shots this season.
Get your fucking flu shots, people. I haven’t had the flu in 15 years since I started getting them annually. We finally got past the hospital overflowing with patients free-dumbing themselves to death with COVID and now we’re filling up with patients due to another highly preventable disease.
Can confirm, my husband (RN-DMC Detroit) got the Flu A this past weekend, I was sick the week before but not as much as him but I haven’t recovered yet, I have a cough that doesn’t want to go away and I am tired all the time. We got both the influenza shots back in October but everyone is sick around us. Cant wait for damn Spring time.
You’re so naive. The problem isn’t your so-called “flu”. These people have clearly been eating tree-nut-oils. Stupid people.
/s
“we’ve never had this happen” As infrastructure ages, you’re gonna have a whole lot more “never had this happen”. They best get to checking the integrity of the various pipes based on age.
It’s times like this that I’m glad I live on the high point of my area. For my house to flood, houses 2km down the road would have to be underwater, including all the farmland behind my house, and the wetland behind it.
I’m sure that the spending cuts the Trump administration is doing will totally make this better in the coming years…
/s
I’m not surprised, but also kind of am.
“It took a couple of hours to find the valves that were covered in ice and snow to be able to isolate and shut off the water and identify exactly where the break was.”
Why isn’t there even a rough map of the system? At least to the main shutoff valves? Flooding in one area, shutoff all valves leading to that right away. “covered in snow” is a silly excuse. Obviously their procedure now is to drive around, look for something that looks like a water main valve, turn it off and see what happens. Then drive around looking for another…
This is like me living in a house for years and then saying: It took me a couple of hours to find the circuit breaker panel because of all of the furniture, shelving, and cabinets in the house.
Utility worker here, though not in Detroit. The maps are there, and they’re probably pretty good. However, no plan survives contact with reality. Transmission mains don’t have a lot of valves of their own, but there will be multiple places where a distribution main branches off from it. In order to shut down one segment of a transmission main you have to locate the shut off valves for every distribution main that connects to it. A good water system has lots of loops to prevent stagnant water in dead-end mains so you’re looking for a lot of valves. Then add in that many of them are now under water, under huge piles of snow from the plows, maybe under street furniture that was thoughtlessly placed over a manhole. Transmission main valves are huge and require mechanical assistance to turn, so once you find it and access it you have to get a vehicle positioned just right in order to hook up and turn that valve stem. Every valve is in a pit in the ground, so the closer you get to the break the more likely it is the valve chamber is full of water. Somehow that has to be drained so a person can access the valve and that’s another challenge when a 54″ pipe is pumping thousands of gallons per minute into your workspace.
From where I’m sitting, I’m impressed that they isolated that break in ONLY a few hours.
Thanks!
Although I’m disappointed that my off-the-cuff snarky judgement was unfounded (I do love snarky judgements), I appreciate the knowledge gained.
I’ll tell you a story that your snark does apply to! One day about 15 years ago, I came home from work to find a hole in the driveway on the side I typically parked, so I pulled in the yard instead. I stuck my arm in the hole, couldn’t feel anything, and called my dad, who understandably didn’t believe me. He said he’d look when he got home. Shined a flashlight down there and the hole was about eight feet in diameter and six feet deep, so I got lucky I didn’t park there.
A 24″ storm drain that ran under the driveway had a hole in it and had tried to drain our driveway. It would get repaired twice. Later two other holes would appear near the house, right up against the foundation.
The house was built in 1962, but a few years before, the town had pissed off an engineer who then burned all the maps in a fit of rage. They had no idea that storm drain ran diagonally across that lot and allowed the house to be built there. The foundation is now cracked from crushing that storm drain in two places and thanks to the wonders of municipal law, my parents are on the hook for the entire repair. Already been to court and lost.
Lucky you didn’t land in a sinkhole.
My specific work is with sewers and construction permits. This is a perfect example of why we don’t allow anyone to build within 10′ of a public sanitary or combined sewer, and yet I get developers who will argue with me for weeks on end. My job is to protect homeowners from their builders.
In situations like yours, and we have seen it here, we try to be as helpful as we can – within the law. There’s a limit on how much public money can be spent to remediate problems on private property. I think our solution would have been to work with you to lay a replacement pipe and then fill, seal, and abandon that 24″. Since sewers are gravity systems it can be challenging to find a good alternate route though, and it would have taken years to get to a point where construction could actually start.
The developers who argue for weeks have probably never learned the hard way. The only solution that didn’t involve my parents footing the entire bill would have involved doing what you mentioned, but they’d have had to cut down all the trees on the property to do it. When I was a kid, getting rid of the walnut tree sounded great, but dad’s been dumping them on his other property outside town and slowly turning the unused field into a walnut grove… something we contemplated intentionally doing anyway right after he got it. The local wildlife has certainly appreciated it, and the extra trees have helped expand the natural wetland that’s always existed in one spot. Grandpa always left it and farmed around it.
Not long ago, Detroit was still using a “push pin” map from the 60’s for their street lighting. It is not out of the question that they don’t have a map for the water shutoffs.
https://detroitography.com/2013/11/09/map-public-lighting-in-detroit/
That’s concerning…
I love Detroit, although I live in FL now. But it’s always been a little bit of a basket case in need of modernization.
Another bit of perspective.
If I remember correctly, a 54″ gate valve takes about 160 turns of the operating nut to fully close. Sediment and deposits in the pipe are a real concern at this size, so it probably has to be closed, partially opened, and closed again, several times, until it finally seals.
In addition, even if you know exactly where the valve box is, you’ll have to drive there, get the top off the valve box, which is probably packed with ice, and get the valve turning machine lined up.
Multiply that by both ends of the pipe run at a minimum. Plus any branch lines.
That all takes time.
“Morning! Sh*tter was full!”
–Dennis Quaid, National Lampoon’s Apocalyptic Vacation
I’d love to see Dennis Quaid take over that role from Randy.
It’s not about damage, per se; it’s about ensuring the wipers are not locked in place by snow/slush freezing overnight.
I mean, yes, there can be damage if people try to yank the wipers free instead of thawing them, but if the ice is allowed to melt the wipers will emerge unharmed.
My 4runner having a windshield heating element for the wipers is one of my favorite features.
But you can’t see to drive with ice on your windshield anyway, so….
And the damage could range as minor as a broken blade all the way up to destroying the motor or wiper transmission and becoming a major repair bill.
I know a few people who swear that you shouldn’t do this because “you’ll wear out the spring in the arm”.
My theory is that if I take a year or two off the life of the spring it is still cheaper than replacing the wiper blade I damage hacking away at the ice.
On some cars the spring is so strong now that if it snaps back for any reason it will crack the windshield. I saw that happen to someone with a BMW last year. I just put my wipers into ‘service position’ so they don’t freeze up in the cowl. If I’m expecting ice rain, I’ll just lift them a little and slide a stick or something under to have them mostly released from the windshield. If I totally forget and come to see them frozen to the windshield, or back hatch glass, I keep a spray bottle of windshield washer with de-icer in it (in the house). Spray and wait a little before starting the car, Remember, just starting the car will try to move the wipers from ‘service’ even if the wiper switch is not on.
The de-icer is great around door frames too when you can’t get them open or risk tearing a seal.
I consider myself lucky to live in a climate where this knowledge and experience is unnecessary but I hope I remember it when I rent a car in Nome!
Thankfully my Soul doesn’t have springs that strong. And really that seems unnecessarily strong in my experience.
I did once break a windshield slamming the wiper into it to break up some ice on the blade, but I think there was also a lot of it being the cheapest windshield they could possible find to sell the car with a valid safety. And with the sheer amount of rust on the window frame I feel like the windshield was probably under a fair amount of existing strain from them trying to jam it in and seal it so it mostly didn’t leak.
That car should have been taken off the road years before but it did solid duty as a winter beater for 2 years, always starting and getting me to work.
Most people don’t understand how much of the water system piping across the country has simply aged out and needs to be replaced. Of course, the procedure is work on it, IF it gives problems.
Believe it or not, the earliest versions of underground water piping is hollowed out logs connected with tar. There are likely some of these “pipes” still in use in the very earliest water systems on the east coast.
Can confirm. Much of the piping infrastructure operated by Detroit Water and Sewer District/Great Lakes Water Authority DWSD/GLWA (GLWA was stood up at the start of 2016 in response to Kwame using DWSD as his personal piggy bank) dates to the 1930s, 50s, or 70s, not a whole lot after that.
The good news, since Jan 20th the interest in funding these types of entities is only decreasing.
I had a section of wood watermain for a long time. It was recovered during construction of our temple to Professional Sports. Our water utility also has some well-preserved examples in a museum and a few offices. Supposedly, the term “fire plug” comes from the idea that they would have to dig up a section of main, drill a hole to get some water for firefighting, and then plug it again. Not sure I believe this since the time it takes to dig that hole would be more than enough for a fire to consume a building in its entirety.
Can confirm. Baltimore had (has?) a museum devoted to public works. They had examples of this
It isn’t just sewers; our power company just replaced a section of 100-year-old oil-filled transmission cable in a decayed pipe not because it was time, but because they had to cut in for another connection. The mile on either side of the cut remains as-is.
The hexagon logo for Chase bank actually dates back through various mergers to the company that installed Manhattan’s water pipes back in the 1800s. The logo is a cross section of the wooden water pipes.
I blame Trump and his fixation with ICE cars.
Also: “ICE can detain cars indefinitely without due process”
Pure Michigan
On the plus side, if you hurry, you can chip out all the ice before it melts and does real damage to the car.
What do you mean “that’s not how this works?” 🙂
Good thing those folks lifted their wipers so that something wouldn’t be damaged by something…
You do what you can to prevent the damage you. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes the universe is like “hold my beer”.
I’m telling you it can flood ANYWHERE!
I still think houses on stilts are superior, they would be the only homes to be mostly unscathed during such a scenario
Sucks for all the cars either way though.
We need cars on stilts!
*cough* *cough* Donks *cough* *cough*
Hovervan
Make infrastructure great again.
Lead pipes don’t melt steel beams.
‘Infrastructure month’ is only 2 weeks away.
Always
In two months, once this thaws, we’ll see these cars back on the roads held together by bailer twine, duct tape, and rust.
So, status normal for Michigan.
Why does David Tracy come to mind when you say that?
Sorry….
Frigid, below-zero temps combined with very low snow cover. The frost penetrates much deeper into the ground if there’s no “snow blanket”.
Detroiters are The Frozen People.
Yikes. And no warning/chance to prepare. That’s terrible.