About Cleveland Water Intake
The Cleveland Water Intake is the visible offshore half of the system that provides drinking water to 1.4 million people across northeastern Ohio. Three concrete cribs sit roughly three miles offshore, drawing water from the deeper, cooler layers of Lake Erie and piping it by tunnel beneath the lakebed back to the Division Avenue Pumping Station and three other municipal treatment plants. The cribs have been in more or less continuous service since 1874.
History
Farther and Deeper
Cleveland's first public water-supply system, built in 1856, drew water directly from the shoreline at the foot of Erie Street. The arrangement was doomed from the start: the shoreline also received the city's sewage and the industrial discharge of the Cuyahoga. Typhoid and cholera outbreaks were annual events through the 1860s.
The first offshore intake crib — the "Kirtland Crib," built in 1874 at a point 6,600 feet from shore — was the city's first attempt to draw water from beyond its own pollution. It was followed by successively larger and more distant cribs as the city grew and the shoreline pollution worsened: the Five-Mile Crib of 1896, the Crown Intake of 1918 (now the Kirtland), and the Nottingham Intake of 1951.
Today
Infrastructure Made Visible
Three cribs remain in active service, located approximately three and four miles offshore. They are visible from the lakefront on clear days as squat, pagoda-roofed concrete structures on the horizon, and from the air as small islands in the open lake.
The system they feed — four municipal treatment plants and over 5,400 miles of distribution mains — serves the city of Cleveland, most of Cuyahoga County, and portions of Lake, Geauga, Medina, and Summit counties. Cleveland Water is the largest water utility in Ohio and the tenth-largest in the United States.
Nearby on the Shoreline