Brenda Butler’s home, located just one exit from where the Connor Creek flows under I-94 in the Chandler Park neighborhood, has been flooded several times.
She’s lost equipment and belongings every time it has flooded over the past decade. Although she received some compensation from FEMA, it still wasn’t enough to cover the total costs of her damages.
Butler attended a public workshop Tuesday afternoon held by the Great Lakes Water Authority, the regional water and wastewater treatment authority serving Southeast Michigan, in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The meeting was one in a series being held across Metro Detroit to kick off a multi-year study aimed at identifying flood management measures designed to alleviate flooding.
The project received $500,000 for the study this fiscal year, with second-year funding of $600,000 pending Congressional approval for fiscal year 2025. GLWA will provide a 50/50 in-kind match and co-lead the study with USACE. The study’s area of focus overlaps with GLWA’s service map, which operates in communities across Wayne, Oakland, Monroe, Macomb, Washtenaw, Genesee and St. Clair counties.
Butler said she came to the meeting to learn more about how the study will prevent future flooding. She hopes she will never again have to go through the turmoil of flooding.
“I wanted to know that I would not have to go through that financial burden again,” she said, noting that many families in her neighborhood continue to have issues with mold and structural damage from the floods.
As the study gets underway, state and federal officials are seeking community input to guide their investigation.
“We want to make sure we’re out in the public early to see what they want us to prioritize,” Eric Ellis, a project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Detroit District, told Planet Detroit. “We’re asking people, if they had unlimited funding to solve flooding in Southeast Michigan, what they would want to do.”
Southeast Michigan has experienced numerous flooding events in recent years, with FEMA issuing five federal disaster declarations since 2000. In 2022, Congress passed the Water Resources Development Act, which authorized the Army Corps of Engineers to study flood risk management in urbanized areas such as Southeast Michigan, with particular attention to climate change, fluctuating water levels in the Great Lakes and the region’s aging infrastructure.
The Great Lakes Water Authority, whose wastewater system serves 3.8 million residents, officially announced the flood mitigation study in September following a three-day technical planning meeting with local, state and federal government leaders. Out of that meeting came a preliminary list of over 40 flood mitigation measures, including sewer separation, habitat creation and reforestation.
The survey is projected to take roughly five years to complete, with time needed to gather data, conduct economic, environmental and cultural analyses, and design engineering models. When it is done, the Army Corps of Engineers will submit a report to Congress outlining its findings and recommendations.
Paul Chenault, a resident and block club leader from Detroit’s Midwest neighborhood, attended the workshop in Dearborn on Wednesday. He said he was encouraged that officials were asking for public feedback early in the process.
“I am interested in what they come up with in terms of potential infrastructure improvements for the sewage system in Detroit,” Chenault said. “Hopefully they improve or upgrade what they currently have.”
Ellis said many participants are interested in green stormwater infrastructure. Green stormwater infrastructure refers to practices that manage rainwater by using natural processes to reduce runoff and improve water quality.
Among them was Simone Sagovac, a longtime resident of Detroit’s Delray neighborhood and project director of the Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition. She encouraged agency representatives to consider short-term solutions and coordinated strategies across neighboring watersheds.
“We can’t wait for implementation when it’s 10 years down the road,” said Sagovac. “I understand that it might take these very solid plans before we can get money from Congress approved, but for green infrastructure, there’s probably multiple funding sources.”
Southeast Michigan residents are invited to attend the remaining public workshops or submit questions and comments online at https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/semifloodstudy/
MEETING DATES AND LOCATIONS:
- Monday, December 9: Waterford Oaks Activity Center, 2800 Watkins Lake Road, Waterford Township, MI
- Tuesday, December 10: Sterling Heights Community Center (Room 1), 40250 Dodge Park Road, Sterling Heights, MI
- Monday, December 16: Grosse Pointe War Memorial, 32 Lake Shore Drive, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI
It would be great to see a revisiting of daylighting Detroit’s streams like Connor’s Creek. This will not only mitigate flood risk, but provide large naturalistic parkland to Detroit’s residents, restore ecosystems for indigenous wildlife and plants, and repurpose much of the empty land in the city for valuable use.
Most importantly, if daylighted streams are truly physically and culturally integrated with city, they will become a part of its identity, a major source of tourism and thereby economic growth for the city.
It is even possible that such a project may not even cost the city a dime in the long-run if it were to pursue the same financial approach as Brooklyn Bridge Park. This is a park too that was designed to mitigate flood risk through the restoration of salt marshes, the introduction of permeable shorelines, and the building up of artificial hills and berms along the shoreline. All of these are beloved features of the parkland, but serve the dual purpose of preventing flooding from New York’s East River like was seen in 2017’s Hurricane Sandy. The beautiful part of the park is that it is completely financially self-sustaining—the park conservancy owns and maintains several properties along its edge that it leases to small businesses with profit sharing agreements. These are mostly restaurants and shops that serve park-goers, so the businesses both benefit from and sustain the park in a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship.
I would very much like to see the same approach to mitigating flood risk taken in Detroit. I have been collecting some historical documents from previous investigations into the matter and would be happy to share them if this is a subject Bridge Detroit is interested in exploring or advocating for.