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AUBURN HILLS, Mich. (FOX 2) – Crews continue to work around the clock to fix the massive Oakland County water main break.<\/p>\n
The backstory:<\/p>\n
The break, which occurred around 1:30 a.m. in River Woods Park, has led to water restrictions in Orion Township, Lake Orion, Rochester Hills, and Auburn Hills \u2013 impacting a 36-mile span.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some residents may only have a trickle of water – but many have none at all.<\/p>\n
The water main was first discovered to be leaking on Thursday and Great Lakes Water Authority officials tried to wait and divert water.<\/p>\n
“Sunday morning at 1:30 a.m. it broke apart, it blew apart,” said Sue Coffey, the CEO of the GLWA. “If we would have isolated it to fix it at that time, (Thursday-Saturday) it would have put Orion Township and that northern part of Auburn Hills out of water instantly.<\/p>\n
“At that moment, we said, ‘Okay, worst case scenario, it’s going to break – here’s our emergency response plan.'”<\/p>\n
The massive broken pipe was pulled out from about 25 feet down and replaced but it still needs to be connected.<\/p>\n
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FOX 2: “You didn’t think it was going to break, did you?”<\/p>\n
“We figured it would break at some point,” Coffey said.<\/p>\n
FOX 2: “Was this pipe inspected before it blew up?”<\/p>\n
“This was on the schedule to be inspected in 2030,” Coffey said.<\/p>\n
FOX 2: “If you would have inspected it Monday of last week, would you have found the problem?”<\/p>\n
“Don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell you that.”<\/p>\n
FOX 2: “You can tell me.”<\/p>\n
“No I literally can’t,” she said.<\/p>\n
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Related<\/p>\n
Coffey said that in 1975 when the pipe was put into place, at the time it was the best pipe for high pressure technology.<\/p>\n
FOX 2: “Now?”<\/p>\n
“No,” Coffey said. “Most typically it is the pre-stressing wires that have deteriorated more rapidly. It’s a tough problem.<\/p>\n
“Let me say this, to replace this pipe is about $20 million a mile. We have 80 miles of this type of pipe in our system – that’s $1.6 billion.”<\/p>\n
FOX 2: “If you don’t replace them and spend all that money, can we have one of these things again?”<\/p>\n
“Yes,” she said.<\/p>\n
![\"Residents](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/4onm5oy7auvoh85n.jpg\")
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The Source: Suzanne Coffey, the chief executive officer for the Great Lakes Water Authority was interviewed for this story.\u00a0<\/p>\n
News<\/a>Auburn Hills<\/a>Lake Orion<\/a>Oakland County<\/a>Rochester Hills<\/a>Instastories<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUBURN HILLS, Mich. (FOX 2) – Crews continue to work around the clock to fix the massive Oakland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311053,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[3443,2444,6655,249,100,143,904,145,144,3414,425,1181],"class_list":["post-311052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-auburn-hills","tag-instastories","tag-lake-orion","tag-mi","tag-news","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-county","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-rochester-hills","tag-series","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311052","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311052"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311052\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}