Detroit Water and Sewerage Department

The roots of Detroit’s municipal water service extend back to 1836, when the city began formalizing its public water supply operations.

A new water treatment plant was built on Jefferson Avenue in 1876, and its grounds were a public park known as Water Works Park. It included an iconic standpipe tower that was demolished in 1945, and the entrance was the monumental Hurlbut Memorial Gate. A larger treatment plant was built there in the 1920s. The current plant dates to 2003.

For many decades, the department was known as the Department of Water Supply (DWS). In 1973, under Detroit’s revised city charter, it was reorganized and renamed the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD).

The department has occupied the historic Water Board Building at 735 Randolph Street since the early decades of the 20th century. The building was originally constructed in the late 1920s and gradually became the department’s primary headquarters by the 1990s.

In a 1992 survey, "nine of the 119 water purveyors that receive DWSD water indicated that considerable amounts of unlined cast-iron pipe were in place", and that "two-thirds of the eighteen survey respondents also indicated that red/rusty water occurrences were the most common cause of customer complaints". This was associated with the occurrence of iron uptake in the pipes.

In 2000, the DWSD provided water for around four million customers in Detroit and its metropolitan area. At this time, the department utilized five water treatment plants that were fed from three raw water intakes, two of which were sourced from the Detroit River and one of which was sourced from Lake Huron. The water treatment plants used the technologies of "pre-chlorination, rapid mix, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration and chlorine disinfection". At this time, the five water treatment plants were Waterworks Park, Springwells, Northeast, Southwest and Lake Huron.

In September 2014, as part of Detroit's bankruptcy restructuring plan, a deal was reached amongst regional authorities to transfer operation of the water system to Great Lakes Water Authority. The city of Detroit continues to own and operate water and sewage pipes, tunnels and plants within the city borders. Under the deal, the outdated system would receive $50 million in upgrades each year.