Cleveland, OH: 1856 Waterworks

(Satellite)

In the background of some photos of the Shipyard in Cleveland, I noticed some buildings with red roofs. They are one of the four pump and water treatment facilities for the Cleveland water supply.

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The waterworks designed by Theodore Scowden started operation on Sep 24, 1856. " The original pump station is now the site of the Garrett A. Morgan Water Treatment Plant (one of four in Cleveland Water’s system) which pumps an average of 60 million gallons of water a day." The water intake was located 300' out into Lake Erie and just west of the mouth of the Cuyahoga River.

Pumps via ClevelandWater_first
The two Cornish engines were the first west of the Allegheny mountains.

Reservoir via ClevelandWater_first
The reservoir held 6 million gallons of water. This green space was the site of the reservoir.

Promenade via ClevelandWater_first
The reservoir "was the highest man-made structure in the city at the time."

As Chicago discovered, when you dump your waste into the lake, the lake becomes polluted; and people get waterborne diseases. So in 1869 they started a 5-year project to dig a 6,600' water intake tunnel. In 1911 they added "chlorine to its water to help eradicate cholera and typhoid fever." After several more pump stations and reservoirs were built, they built their first treatment facility in 1917.   [ClevelandWater_history] (This source says that the 1896 tunnel was four miles long with a 9' diameter. But I believe it is wrong. It was the 1916 tunnel that was four miles long.)

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By 1975, their entire service area was getting filtered water.

ClevelandWater_history
1991: "Renovation of the Division Avenue Filtration Plant [the original treatment facility built in 1917] is completed and the plant is rededicated and renamed after Garrett A. Morgan."

By 2000 all four water treatment plants were rebuilt. Since then, they have been building enhanced treatment facilities and replacing water mains.

ClevelandWater_history
2007: "Interior of the Morgan Finished Water Pump Station"

In 1916, the crew constructing the 4-mile 1916 tunnel encountered a natural gas pocket. "A sudden explosion in the middle of the night injured, killed, and buried several workers. As the gas filled the tunnel, the initial rescuers succumbed to the toxic fumes and their fate below ground. Ten of them died." At 4am, the police department called “the inventor of Harlem Avenue.” They asked Garrett Morgan to bring as many of his "safety hoods" as possible. During WWI, Morgan refined the design to invent the gas mask. Another one of his inventions was to add the yellow light between the red and green lights in a traffic light. [OhioMemory]

ClevelandWater_history
1916: "Garrett Morgan, local inventor, rescues several miners trapped when a Cleveland Water tunnel collapses "

20 men were killed in the 1916 tunnel explosion, half of them were rescuers. The 4-mile tunnel was going to Crib #5. Construction started in 1914 and was completed in 1918. When the next water intake project was started in 1948, they did not tunnel to the crib. "The project was constructed by digging a trench in the lake bed from a crane mounted on a barge, and then laying prefabricated pipe into the trench." [usminedisasters and ClevelandHistorical]

Encountering natural gas while tunneling under the lake was not new. Four of the five disasters that occurred while digging the previous tunnel were because of gas explosions and they killed 28 workers. (The fifth was a fire in a crib, which killed 9 men.) That 9' tunnel was started in 1896 and completed in 1904. [case]