What is Cleveland’s brand? This city is a mosaic of music, medicine and history. We’re proud of our restaurant scene, neighborhoods, arts, sports teams and legacy as an industrial maker city. As a people, we are resilient, used to a challenge and used to facing a comeback. Nowhere is our city more focused on a comeback than on our waterways — the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie. With continued restoration and innovation, Cleveland can be known as a great waterfront city once again.
Building our brand as a “green city on a blue lake” begins with keeping our water clean. Fifty years after the last Cuyahoga River fire that landed Cleveland in Time Magazine as the poster child for the Clean Water Act, we are cleaning up our waterways thanks to an incredible coalition of local partners. A bipartisan delegation of Ohio’s congressional representatives recently fought gargantuan cuts proposed by the White House and restored Great Lakes Restoration Act funding through 2018. And, in federal court, the Port of Cleveland recently won a challenge against the Army Corps of Engineers’ “federal standard” for sediment management, which would have mandated the deposit of contaminated dredge material from the Cuyahoga River into the open waters of Lake Erie, endangering aquatic life and human health. In both cases, Cleveland fought the good fight for cleaner water standards and won.
At the center of our water restoration efforts is innovation. Located 5 miles upstream from the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, the Port of Cleveland’s bed load interceptor — the first of its kind — collects sediment before it settles into the Cuyahoga River’s shipping channel. The interceptor has collected 10,000 tons of sediment since 2015 and could reduce the need for dredging by 10 to 15 percent. For contaminated sediments already in the navigation channel, the Port is diverting material to what’s called a “sluiceway” on the east end of Burke Airport where it is dewatered and distributed for purposes approved by the Ohio EPA for things such as fill material for construction and roadways.
This spring, the Cleveland Water Alliance hosted the Erie Hack Water Innovation Summit to identify innovative practices to improve water quality. It included teams that created models to detect and curtail threats to Lake Erie, which contains 50 percent of all fish caught in the Great Lakes. From an economic development perspective, it’s exciting to see commercial ideas surface from teams at the summit like Hydrosense, who put forth an idea for a wireless data buoy to monitor algae bloom, which is a huge threat to the Great Lakes.
Building off of events like Erie Hack and putting a new twist on the Great Lakes Expo Cleveland hosted in 1936 and 1937, our city could rightly host a world water summit that focuses on the restoration and preservation of clean water. By focusing on research and development, ideas for the water industries could spinoff commercially viable ideas for a more sustainable world.
While the term “burning river” lives on in our beer labels, band names and roller derby teams, it’s used more as a nostalgic term of endearment than for who we are today. More important than where we’ve been is where we are going. What we really are is a city that is transforming itself in sync with the transformation of its water system. Given how far we have come, the comeback of our water system and our fight for clean water could rightly earn Cleveland the distinction as the Fresh Water Capital of the new Waterbelt.
Restoration, Innovation, Leverage. Fifty years ago our waterfront location meant something entirely different than it does today. Because of the stewardship efforts of many Cleveland partners, this city is finally realizing a new relationship with its environment. As Cleveland begins to leverage its position on two great waterways — Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River — there’s an opportunity to claim a new brand and tell a new narrative. When a 50-year-old story of contaminated water is updated to depict the comeback of our city and our waterways, it becomes one of transformation. And like everything Cleveland, this transformation is earned. Let’s build on our momentum of restoration, innovation and a comeback that earns us the title of Fresh Water Capital. Claim it, Cleveland. You’ve earned it.