CLEVELAND — Being a lifeguard at Edgewater Beach was a lonely job Tuesday. They're used to protecting people in the water, not from it, but after Monday night’s heavy rainfall forced the release of untreated stormwater and sewage into the lake it wasn’t safe to swim in. You see, Cleveland is one of around 800 cities across the country that have what are called combined sewers, where the sewage from your homes travels in the same pipes as the stormwater from your street to the water treatment plant.
"So when you have heavy rain that falls there's only one of three that this places that this water can go it's either flooding the plant, flooding homes or it discharges into the environment,” said Jeannie Smith of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
At Edgewater, it does so through a discharge site not far away from the beach. Behind it sits brick lined century old tunnels. Back in the early 70s, a good 9 billion gallons of untreated water would flow through those tunnels directly out into the lake. Now, over the last four decades they've been able to cut that down to about 4 billion—the goal eventually get it down to under a half billion.
They're doing that through Project Clean Lake. It's the largest infrastructure project in Northeast Ohio history but one you likely will never notice, except for the fact that the $3 billion price tag is entirely rate payer funded. The project consists of seven massive, miles long, storage tunnels under greater Cleveland that can hold millions of gallons of that combined water and sewage during a storm until it can be pumped out later, treated and pumped back into the lake.
"Three of those are currently operating and we have two under construction at this point,” Smith said. The three that are now open can prevent 1.7 billion gallons a year of that combined sewer overflow from flowing into the lake. The fourth tunnel to go online next year is the Westerly Tunnel just above Edgewater that stretches two miles underneath the Tremont, Ohio City and Detroit-Shoreway neighborhoods. It will prevent another 330 million gallons from going into the Cuyahoga each year. Today, the combined sewer overflow here discharges more than 40 times in a typical year.
While it won't prevent entirely inconvenient days like this at Edgewater, the efforts are making them less frequent.
"It used to discharge about 40 to 50 times (a year) 40 to 50 years ago and now we're down to maybe once every year,” Smith said. Ironically, the last time there was a discharge at Edgewater was exactly one year ago, Aug. 8, 2021.
RELATED: Sewage overflows into Lake Erie at Edgewater Beach due to Monday night's storms
Monday, the NEORSD issued a Public Health Advisory about the sewage overflow. You can watch more about it in the player below:
