Sewage made its way into Lake Erie near Edgewater Beach Saturday due to heavy rain, but the water quality is back to normal, according to the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. The storms caused more than 43,000 gallons of sewage and stormwater to enter the lake, marking the first time in 2025 NEORSD's underground combined sewer system was pushed beyond its limits.
Though that may seem like a lot, this is just 2% over the capacity of the Edgewater Beach CSO, NEORSD Public Information Specialist Jessica Shutty said. To the district, the amount reflects an improvement to their overflow systems.
"It opened like a very minimal amount, which is why it only let out 43,400 gallons of overflow," she said. "It's still raw sewage into the environment, which we get, but ... in our world, it's not as significant due to the great work that we've done as it has been in the past."
NEORSD continues to address the problem
Combined sewer overflows collect both stormwater and sewage when it rains where its held before it's treated, but during heavy rain, these systems exceed capacity and spill out into Lake Erie and other bodies of water near an outfall.
In 2010, NEORSD kicked off its Project Clean Lake to address its CSO systems and reduce overflows.
"That's our tunnel work, that's building storage units that are underground, holding that water that needs to be treated after major rainfalls, holding onto it until our systems at the treatment plants can take in that water and then treating them and then discharging it back out to the lake."
Work on the sewer district's westerly and southerly tunnels is still underway. The CSO upgrades completed to date are working, Shutty said, but certain storms can still lead to a mix of sewage and stormwater ending up in the lake.
"If it rains for all day or two days, if it's a steady rain, that's something that our collection system can handle," she said, "but when it's these bursts and it's just dumping, buckets of water, in lack of better words, into our collection system we can only handle so much."
NEORSD crews monitor the water quality daily in Lake Erie at two points with easy recreational access, Edgewater Beach and Villa Angela Beach, Shutty said. In the event of an overflow, crews take samples of the water twice a day to understand where contaminant levels are and how quickly they're normalizing.
"We can't treat Lake Erie, obviously, and we can't tree Villa Angela or different waterways," she said, "but we want make sure that the trend of it kind of going away and working itself out."
A chance for future overflows
NEORSD crews monitor weather forecasts and CSO levels during storms, and are ready to increase testing, restrict access to the waterfront and clean up beaches when necessary.
The likelihood of another overflow is tough to predict, Shutty said, since it depends on the frequency of short, heavy rains this summer.
"Every year we're like hopeful because every we're doing more and more work to help eliminate this," Shutty said. "We don't know, and of course it's Cleveland, so we just always prepare for something to happen."
Information on NEORSD daily water quality predictions can be found on the sewer district's website.
