STERLING HEIGHTS, MI — The two-story brick house at Sorrento Boulevard and Dodge Park Road has landscaping, windows and a roofline that blends into the surrounding Sterling Heights neighborhood.
But nobody lives there.
Behind the brick walls is a large industrial fan and a vessel filled with activated carbon, machinery built to suck corrosive gas from a huge sewer buried deep underground.
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The $5.3 million faux house is the latest piece of a broader effort in Macomb and Oakland counties to combat hydrogen sulfide, a foul-smelling gas that can eat away at concrete sewer pipes.
“Appearances can be deceiving. In this case, wonderfully deceiving,” Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Candice Miller said during an Oct. 5 ribbon-cutting.
“This facility was designed to be aesthetically pleasing and be a nice fit in a nice neighborhood with the greater purpose of eliminating the foul smell here that resulted in periodic complaints from residents for years and to protect the underground infrastructure,” she said.
The building sits above the Oakland-Macomb Interceptor, a major sewage system serving 11 Macomb County communities and 13 Oakland County municipalities that sends sewage to the Great Lakes Water Authority wastewater treatment system in Detroit.
At the Sorrento Boulevard site, officials say turbulent raw sewage flow generates hydrogen sulfide, or H2S. The gas has caused odor problems in the neighborhood for years.
A large fan inside the new facility pulls air from the interceptor and sends it through a vessel containing activated carbon before the treated air is released outside. The machinery inside is loud, but officials say the noise cannot be heard outside.
But reducing the smell is only part of the job.
Hydrogen sulfide in wastewater systems can ultimately form sulfuric acid on concrete surfaces, degrading sewer pipes and other structures.
The Oakland-Macomb system, built in the 1970s, has experienced significant deterioration from that process, according to Oakland County reports.
That concern is driving an $11.5 million rehabilitation project underway on another section of the 15 Mile Interceptor in Clinton Township, where inspections found hydrogen sulfide corrosion had eaten away more than an inch of concrete in portions of the sewer.
“If you don’t get ahead of it, you’re going to have another sinkhole. That’s what happens,” Miller said when the project was announced in June.
The threat is not hypothetical.
On Christmas Eve in 2016, an 11-foot diameter sewer interceptor about 60 feet beneath 15 Mile Road collapsed in Fraser, opening a football field-sized sinkhole that forced evacuations and triggered a major emergency response.
Officials blamed operational error rather than hydrogen sulfide for the collapse. But corrosion from the gas is a known threat in the system and county officials say it can eventually contribute to failures if deteriorated pipes are left unchecked.
At Sorrento Boulevard, the “house” facility removes hydrogen sulfide before it has as much opportunity to attack the sewer in the first place.
“Most people don’t think about what happens underground after they flush a toilet or run water down the drain,” said Jim Nash, Oakland County water resources commissioner. “These improvements help protect the system from corrosion, reduce nuisance odors, and extend the life of infrastructure that our communities rely on every day.”
The Sorrento Boulevard project began construction in March 2025 and became operational this spring. County officials said it was completed without a sewer rate increase.
Macomb County has spent the past several years adding hydrogen sulfide controls and rehabilitating large interceptors across the system.
Another facility is being designed near 15 Mile Road west of Schoenherr Road, where residents have complained about sewer odors. County officials have described that project as the final piece of a multiyear effort to reduce hydrogen sulfide in that portion of the system. Construction there is tentatively expected to begin in 2027.
At Sorrento Boulevard, officials faced an aesthetics problem. The equipment sits next to people’s homes and rather than surrounding a conspicuous industrial facility with fencing, designers disguised structure’s true nature.
Sterling Heights Mayor Pro Tem Liz Sierawski called the design a way to solve an infrastructure problem without making the solution itself a neighborhood nuisance.
“By thoughtfully designing the facility to resemble a home, we are addressing a longstanding infrastructure challenge in a way that respects the aesthetics and character of the surrounding neighborhood,” she said.