CLEVELAND — For a second summer afternoon Edgewater Beach remained off limits to swimmers Tuesday following the release Monday of a combination of sewage and stormwater into Lake Erie.
It's the first such overflow of the season, with the last occurring here on Aug. 23, 2023.
Karen Hittner drove up from outside Columbus with her family just to visit Edgewater Tuesday, unaware of the restrictions.
"Yeah we came just for this beach and we can't get in the water, all of the kids were so excited," she said.
Cleveland is one of 800 cities across the country that have what are called combined sewers, where the sewage from your home travels in the same pipes as the stormwater from your street to the water treatment plant.
"It's great and it works wonderfully when you have regular weather but when you have heavy rains, the rain overwhelms the system," said Jennifer Elting of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
To prevent it from backing into homes or flooding the wastewater treatment plant, it's released untreated into the lake. To help address this is Project Clean Lake, at $3 billion it is the most expensive infrastructure project in Northeast Ohio history. The 25-year project started in 2011, includes the digging of seven massive tunnels under greater Cleveland, some miles long, that can hold millions of gallons of combined water and sewage during a storm and then be pumped out later, treated and released into the lake.
Back in the 1970s, more than 9 billion gallons of untreated water would flow into Lake Erie after heavy rains. They were eventually able to get that down to around 4 billion. Project Clean Lake will bring it under half a billion gallons.
"We've recently broken ground on tunnel number six," said Elting. "Our first three tunnels are fully operational and online. Our Westerly Storage Tunnel, which was tunnel No. 4, will be up very soon once we get the pump station completed. And then we have the Shoreline Storage Tunnel and the Southerly Storage Tunnel which is the Big Creek Storage Tunnel still to go."
"We are capturing 1.7 billion of combined sewage, fully treating it and sending it clean and safe back out into the environment and it's not impacting our local waterways."
The tunnel concept is similar to what France tried ahead of the Olympics to make the River Seine clean enough to swim in. Storing stormwater and sewage in a containment area during heavy rains, to be treated and released later. Their issues, though much more severe and more difficult to address led to the issues that forced the postponing of the men's triathlon Tuesday.
"Combined sewers and sewer infrastructure around the globe, a lot of it is very old. Here the sewer at Edgewater Beach dates back to the 1880s; I've seen reports in Paris some of their sewers date back to the 1300s," said Elting.
The $3 billion project is entirely rate payer funded, hence the slow increase over the last decade or so in your sewer bills. Elting said the good news is the project is under budget.
Back at Edgewater, Stacy Hoffman admired the beauty of the lake for the first time, having driven in from New Jersey to see it. They too, have dealt with similar issues on the Jersey Shore and understand it happens.
"The same with Atlantic City," said Hoffman. "It doesn't matter where you're from. I guess these kinds of things happen, it's okay."
