During a City Council meeting earlier this month, Councilwoman Gabriela Santiago-Romero critiqued the city’s response to last year’s devastating water main break in the Springwells neighborhood in Southwest Detroit.

 “We all know, and we should know as a city, that we did not do them right,” Santiago-Romero said. “We need to all be actively speaking on this so that we can bring the narrative right, so that we continue, so that we’re able to work on this together.” 

One year ago, a 54-inch water main burst in the neighborhood. During freezing temperatures, water filled the streets early in the morning of Feb. 17, affecting hundreds of residents across several blocks. Homes were damaged. Personal belongings and cars were destroyed, and many of the impacted residents were displaced.

Obstacles to a quick response

The city quickly ran into obstacles in the days following the infrastructure failure.

Many wouldn’t answer their doors. Southwest Detroit is the home of a large immigrant population. After the election of Donald Trump, community members had been preparing neighbors for the increased presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This included advising people to not answer their doors for anyone.

Language also quickly became an obstacle. When city officials who facilitated the evacuation and inspections of flooded homes needed translators, they relied on bilingual community members to volunteer for help.

This is how Sonia Rose, a local business owner and organizer for Detroit Southwest Pride, first got involved.

More people answered their doors once trusted neighbors began to accompany city employees. But Rose said most people answered after they started distributing meals without anyone from the city.

“People started opening up the door cause now they’re a few days hungry, right,”  Rose said. “So, ‘do you need anything?’ ‘Can we get you more stuff? And they’re like, you know, ‘we don’t have blankets’ … So we started to understand what people were needing very, very quickly. Like, before the city was even thinking about stuff.” 

Community fills the gaps

In the days following, a network of individual volunteers, nonprofits, and businesses quickly started to organize and address blind spots in the city’s response. Volunteers on the ground were assigned specific blocks to monitor and help. There was even a community-driven database of needs created by the nonprofit Urban Neighborhood Initiatives.

Rose said that without the coordinated response of the community, the situation could’ve been more dire.

“We didn’t have any deaths. We didn’t have any. And there should have been.”

When the city moved people into hotels, tasks for volunteers grew. Food needed to be delivered outside of the neighborhood when people said they weren’t getting three meals at the hotel or only received junk food like hot dogs, pizza, and bologna sandwiches.

Concerns about ICE followed residents

Veronica Rodriguez was one of the volunteers making regular trips to the hotels, mostly in Southfield. She said that, while ICE was less present in the blocks directly affected by flooding, they increased their focus around the hotels where displaced residents were being housed.

Volunteers would try to monitor ICE activity whenever they provided rides to school or work, but many people were still afraid to leave.

“Most of them weren’t able to get their cars out of here, it was just a mess,” Rodriguez said. “The ones that could get rides from that area were scared cause it was quite away to travel for work. So many lost their jobs or they didn’t work for at least thirty days.”

Rodriguez turned down a job offer so she could assist with the response to the water main break. She described volunteering as a 24/7 task. Many who helped in the first sixty days could be out as late as 10 p.m. Even when she got a job months later, she was still taking calls for residents seeking reimbursement from the city for damages.

“It changed their lives but it also changed mine to where you don’t trust your government,” Rodriguez said. “As much as the City of Detroit and the Water Department want to take credit for the water, the food, the donations, the meals, and all that, 85% of all that was community.”

Laura Chavez, founder of Raices Detroit, was another community member who was deeply involved in the volunteer efforts and offered what she believes is the most important lesson from the city’s response to the water main break: “If community is not a part of the discussion when you’re creating an emergency response program or initiative, then you’re going to miss certain things.”

One year later, freezing temperatures led to over 50 water main breaks across the city. Increasing failures in Detroit’s aging water infrastructure make questions of emergency plans more urgent than ever.