DETROIT (WWJ) - Officials for the the Great Lakes Water Authority announced much-needed upgrades to two pumping stations on the city's east side, nearly a year after major flooding left homes and highways underwater.
The GLWA said on Tuesday that the Freud and Blue Hill pumping stations were outfitted with new transformers which connect to its own, individual power feeds, reported The Detroit Free Press. A total of five transformers were installed between the two stations and the facilities were moved to their own external power supply operated by DTE Energy.
They had both previously been using the same power supply as the City's lighting department.
The upgrades are part of GLWA's $1.7 billion, five-year plan to improve the regional system.
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Authorities said the upgrades came just in time for the spring season; officials said the improvements were needed following a devastating rainstorm that hit the Metro area nearly 10 months ago; pumping systems were completely overwhelmed, causing homes, vehicles and major freeways to flood with water.
Officials for the GLWA acknowledged in June of last year that not all pumps were working at the two pumping stations when the storms stuck and a power outage at one of the facilities caused further problems.
GLWA said the intensity of last year's rainstorm was also to blame for the widespread flooding, despite the issues their facilities had. Interim CEO Suzanne Coffey said the upgrades to the stations' reliability can still fail if a large amount of rainfall pushes the systems beyond capacity.
"I'm hoping 2021 was an anomaly, but we're preparing if it wasn't," Coffey said. "I don't want to give you the impression that somehow we can now all of a sudden handle 8 inches of rain in a day, the systems can't handle that, the pipes are the primary bottleneck for that."
A final report into the rain event from June 2021 is still pending, however a preliminary report appears to suggest that no matter what issues the operations had, the massive volume of water that was dumped on the city last summer would've caused the flooding regardless, the Detroit Free Press reported.
Other improvements made at the stations include power quality monitoring systems, protocols and strategies for future rain events and the reinspection of about 13% of the regional system; the system's capacity currently sits at 1.7 inches per hour or 3.3 inches in a 24-hour period.
"We're happy to say that this improvement is a huge step forward in resiliency," Coffey said, "there's no doubt about it."
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