City officials don’t dispute the numbers, but predict they will dramatically decline in coming weeks and months.

“The figure changes every day as we outreach to customers and assistance is provided,” Bryan Peckinpaugh, spokesman for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, wrote Bridge in an email.

The records underscore a misery that Sherry Welch said she knows well. The 50-year-old who lives on Detroit’s east side said she’s subsisted on bottled water and rainwater collected from her roof for three years.

Disabled after a car crash in the 1990s, the former video store owner said she lives on a $790 per month Social Security check and can’t afford plumbing repairs to restore city water after it was disconnected in 2016. The water line to her home was damaged during a winter storm, she said, and is estimated to cost upward of $5,000 to repair.

Because of her injuries, doctors warn against carrying more than a gallon of milk, but Welch said she regularly hauls 5-gallon jugs of water to survive.

“It’s all so overwhelming. I get so tired of it. Tired of living,” Welch said. “It’s not an easy life at all.”

‘Just shocking’

The new numbers, while a snapshot, suggest the human toll is far greater than previously believed. Now in its sixth year, the collections campaign has severed service, at least temporarily, to more than 130,000 homes.

Records don’t indicate how many of those accounts are the same homes, but the overall total is more than all the housing units in Ingham County, home to Lansing.

Related: How to have your voice heard during the Your Water, Your Voice campaign

Detroit disconnects service to residents who are 60 days or $150 past due. For years, city officials described the shutoffs as a short-term measure to improve accountability and have predicted disconnections would plummet as revenue improved.

And accountability has improved: Collection rates increased to more than 90 percent from less than 70 percent in 2013, freeing another $50 million per year to pay for the aging water system.

But the shutoffs continued, averaging about 17,000 the past three years or 1-in-13 of the city’s 229,000 residential accounts. Until last year, the city kept no public records on service restorations and made no effort, publicly at least, to determine whether disconnected homes were occupied.