DETROIT – Detroit is being awarded nearly $60 million to protect families living in flood-prone neighborhoods.
The news is bringing some much-needed help to the city to help prevent this mess.
“Ours were up to the roof in water, in the house sewage, backs up,” said one homeowner.
East Jefferson Avenue and Chalmers Street is one of those neighborhoods that has ended up underwater more than once.
Seen in the video above was last summer.
“It’s not only happened to me but my neighbors, and I mean, we’ve lost a lot,” said another homeowner.
To say residents are fed up is an understatement.
“It’s just one thing after another,” said Scott. “Every time I’m ready to work on something, I’m spending thousands for cleanups from these floods.”
Scott says the temporary fix to those problems is causing more damage to his property’s seawall.
He was interested to learn about a new $57.5 million grant the city received for flood prevention and recovery.
“Help is on the way,” said Gary Brown of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department. “It’s not going to all happen overnight. But we do have the dollars to put a fix to the problems they’ve been experiencing in the past.”
Brown hopes those federal funds will help move projects along.
“We have more projects in the engineering and design phase to help reduce flooding of homes and rebuild infrastructure,” Brown said.
Beginning April 1, the city will start installing backflow prevention valves to keep water out of basements. The hope is with these new dollars is that they can quickly get to all 11-neighborhoods that are prone to flooding.
The first step is planning, public review, and then building a workforce to help make those changes.
In order to do work for the infrastructure, it will require more workforce while also creating more job opportunities.
