CLEVELAND — Three times this summer, the waters of Edgewater Beach had to be closed to swimmers after heavy rains forced the release of untreated water and sewage into Lake Erie.
The release occurs at the western end of the beach, where a four-ton door capping a tunnel constructed in 1894 holds back the runoff until it reaches a point where the pressure causes the door to open.
Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District Planning and Design Program Manager Doug Lopata said it's not something that happens often. Still, when it does, because of its location and the impact on the beach, it's very prominent.
"It's at actually one of our highest levels of control already, which means it takes a larger storm to actually cause that gate to overflow," Lopata said. "However we've seen some pretty extensive storms across that area of the system and when the storms hit there's not a lot of area for the water to go to. It hits a lot of pavement on the westside and so all of that water rushes to that location and has had to discharge."
Back in the early 70s, 9 billion gallons of untreated water would flow through century-old tunnels out into the lake. Over the course of the next four decades, they were able to reduce that to a little over 4 billion; the goal is to get it under a half billion.
We told you how they were achieving that goal through Project Clean Lake, a 25-year, $3 billion project to build seven underground tunnels throughout greater Cleveland, 2-to-5 miles in length, where runoff can be stored during a storm and then pumped out after, treated and released into the lake.
Although Edgewater itself was never part of that project, addressing the less frequent but very public problem here has been a priority that the sewer district has been studying.
"We've been looking at this for a number of years, trying to make small improvements over time," Lopata said. "But we've also looked at a bunch of tunnel options there, different ways to control that gate, raising the gate, closing off other manholes, so we've tried almost everything."
What their models have shown will work is a 1,400-foot tunnel, 10 to 12 in diameter, raised slightly up, extending southwest under the Shoreway.
"It kind of acts as a flood plain to when you get a big storm in a stream it kind of just comes up and spills out so this new tunnel being raised up—it kind of has open space for that flow to come back and kind of spread out and it goes up two different pipes instead of the original pipe that's there today," he said.
They will be meeting with officials at the MetroParks on Monday to go over the plans for the $20 million project with them.
"This will have a construction site basically on the beach, and it will have a construction site with some tree removals up by Lake Road and Viking (Court) Desmond (Avenue) area at the top of the hill by the railroad tracks," Lopata said. "So we need to make sure they're OK with our use of that property, that they can still maintain things, get around us, deal with those impacts."
He said the project is in the pre-design phase. If all goes well, he said they hope that it will be ready to go out to bid in 2027 with completion sometime in 2028.
As for Project Clean Lake itself, he said they've got 16 of the 25 control measures complete. "We've got 2 billion gallons of annual CSO (combined sewage overflow) out of the system and captured in our tunnels. We're about to turn on our Shoreline Storage Tunnel which will be at the end of this year," he said. "So yeah we're kind of on the three quarter point and headed towards home."
