The City of Cleveland was extending its water and sewer lines, and this was a strong enticement for townships and other villages to agree to be annexed. Shaker Heights elected to pay to join the Cleveland system rather than be annexed. As lots were created along the new streets, the water and sewer infrastructure was also installed. However, these were the early days of sewer engineering and not all sewers were designed in the same way. Many of the early sewers combined the storm and sanitary flows, or had cross-connections to handle sudden inflows from storms. CSOs – or combined sewer overflows – and SSOs (sanitary sewer overflows) discharge the entire flow into a river or lake if they are overwhelmed. This was a common early sewer design, and is how the East View Village sewers were originally constructed. As Cleveland grew during the 1800s, water was being extracted from Lake Erie while at the same time untreated sewage was being dumped into it, often in close proximity. The predictable consequences led to changes that separated intakes and outflows. One of the first major projects to improve the sewers was the Easterly Interceptor in 1905. This collected wastewater along a stretch of Cleveland’s East Side before it made it to the lake’s shoreline and diverted it to a central discharge point. This point would become the Easterly Wastewater Treatment Plant. Today the majority of wastewater generated in Shaker is processed at the Easterly Treatment Plant. In the early 1900s, sewer construction generally meant that trenches were dug, sometimes by hand, and large clay pipes were connected together. Small diameter pipes were then branched off to connect houses and buildings to these larger pipes. One common original design in Shaker and other communities was the “over-under,” which was efficient to install because it only required one trench for both the sanitary and storm sewers. But problems can arise when the sanitary sewer gets overwhelmed because of infiltration and cross connections, and spills into the storm mains. The result is an “SSO event,” where untreated sewage ends up in bodies of water. Furthermore, over time the connections can be compromised by tree roots or crushed by heavy loads on the surface. These factors, along with additional housing development and leaks from one set of pipes to the other, led to sewers that were not able to handle the peak flows of storms. The result is like a dam – the water has to go somewhere, and sometimes that somewhere is into basements. WWW.SHAKER.LIFE | SUMMER 2022 61 Opposite page: As it meanders through the neighborhoods, Lomond Boulevard roughly follows the path of a stream bed that ran through the area when it was farmland (map circa 1921).
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