Credit Bryce Huffman / Michigan Radio It was Christmas Eve 2016, and Candice Miller was just days away from taking office after winning the race for Macomb County's public works commissioner, when a section of the interceptor sewer pipe collapsed on 15 Mile Road – causing a sinkhole the size of a football field. The interceptor is a massive sewer line that that carries the waste flushed by more than 500,000 people from nearly a dozen communities in Macomb County to Detroit's wastewater treatment plant. First responders and construction crews rushed to the scene, evacuating people from three homes, two of which had to later be demolished. Engineers quickly jury-rigged a sewer line bypass to ensure that sewage did not flow into the Clinton River, or back up into the basements of countless homes in the county.