Detroit's North Rosedale Park on day 3 with no water following broken valve problem

DETROIT (FOX 2) - For North Rosedale Park resident Audrey Jones, it’s day three with barely any water

"This is it, this is all you got," she said, turning on the tap. "And that’s ridiculous. How do you go three days without water? isn’t that a health hazard?"

She lives in the northwest Detroit neighborhood where a bad valve on a water main left several homes with little to no water pressure.

"So I pay my water bill, I do what I'm supposed to do as a resident, I can’t stay in my home," she said. "There’s no water."

Jones says the water woes have persisted off and on for about two weeks - impacting different areas of the neighborhood.

Detroit Water and Sewerage Department crews got to work Tuesday afternoon and worked into the night to get the water flowing again.

They are flushing hydrants and opening other water main valves to address the low-pressure issue, until they can fix the problematic gate valve for good, Wednesday morning.

"The valves regulate the water flow in the water mains," said Bryan Peckinpaugh. "So when those break or fail they tend to cause low pressure in households."

Peckinpaugh is a spokesman for the city’s water department and says it’s important that residents reach out to them the moment problems arise.

They were not made aware of the problems there until Monday — the nearly century-old pipes there are not equipped with alert systems that let the city know when they fail.

"So we do rely on the customers to call DWSD or use the Improve Detroit app to report it," he said. "So once they call it, we can come out and investigate and see what the cause is and schedule the repair."

DWSD has been doing a lot of that lately spending upwards of  $100 million a year upgrading and maintaining old water mains.

And whether it’s for maintenance or repairs, Cordell Gibson says water crews have spent a lot of time there lately.