Left: Four lab technicians constantly monitor water quality as it moves through the plant in Kent. The facility purifies about 35 million gallons of water each day.
Private homeowners of the day often dug their own wells or built cisterns to store rainwater and snowmelt. There were also public wells downtown, according to water department records, and water was sometimes pumped from ponds. But none of the water was disinfected as it is today, so it sometimes smelled pretty bad and killed lots of people. Cholera sometimes. Typhoid more often. Water in the United States wasn’t chemically treated to prevent infections until 1908.
Akronisms: The things and places you didn’t know about our fair city.
Getting thirsty? BY JEFF DAVIS FOR TDS PHOTOS BY JEFF DAVIS
A famous U.S. Department of Agriculture study from the 1990s found that one in five Americans didn’t know that hamburgers are made of beef. Another study done in California by the non-profit group Food Corps found that half the students they surveyed didn’t know pickles are cucumbers. Three in 10 students didn’t know cheese is made from milk. People, it is said, have disconnected from farm life and no longer know where their food comes from. One wonders if they know where their drinking water comes from. For many people, the answer is the supermarket, right? Don’t the commercials imply that the stuff in those convenient plastic bottles comes from pure lakes in northern Canada or the high mountain streams of the Rockies? But ask yourself two questions: Would you drink water right out of any lake? And how can anyone make money by shipping across the country something that costs so little and is so widely available? With the exception of fizzy waters that come from Europe (at about triple the cost of gasoline), virtually all grocery store bottled water in the US comes from nearby municipal water supplies. It often says so right on the plastic bottle labels. Oh, the marketers will try to cast a spell over
you and make you think their water is better, but is it really? On Akron store shelves, some bottled water comes from Lake Erie via the Cleveland water department and a Cuyahoga County bottler. At least one Summit County bottling plant, unnamed here but whose headquarters is in Atlanta, gets all its water from the City of Akron water supply system. In fairness, these bottlers often filter their supplies to remove any particles picked up in the pipes. And they usually add inorganic salts (for taste, or to make you thirstier?). But, otherwise, they are bottling the same water you might drink from any faucet in Akron, Fairlawn, Tallmadge, Stow, and parts of Hudson and Kent. And all that water comes from the Cuyahoga River by way of Akron’s vast water supply system, a marvel of early 20th century civil engineering. Before Akron had a public water system, Akron’s water sources were varied. Dr. Eliakim Crosby, of Crosby Street fame, lived near the corner of Maple and Market and may have had the first private system. In 1836, he “installed a ‘continuous cement pipe’ to supply water to his house and nearby neighbors from a spring at the foot of Perkin’s Hill,” according to university professor Morris Pierce in his History of American Water-works. Akron’s first commercial supplier was Akron Cold Spring, which built a small system supplying spring water to the west side of town in the 1850s.
Akron’s Community-Owned Magazine
The makings of Akron’s current public water system began when a March 1869 fire burned down all the buildings on Market Street between Main and High Streets. Downtown cisterns supplied only a fraction of the water needed. So, in 1880, local investors built an actual pipe system downtown with 150 scattered hydrants supplied by artesian wells. But Akron’s population quadrupled between 1880 and 1910 and was set to grow faster still. Fire underwriters said the water system was now much too small and that malfunctions in the existing distribution system made it undependable. Something needed to be done. Fast. So, in a May, 1912 special election — back when citizens and government cared about infrastructure — Akron’s residents voted to build a new water system from scratch. As with all water systems, the first phase was securing the raw water. Fortunately, the Cuyahoga was close at hand. It rises near Montville, just below the chimney of Geauga County, then travels roughly 40 miles southwest to Akron before making a big right turn toward Cleveland. Engineers planned to gather most of the upstream river into a reservoir that would feed a new treatment plant in Kent. Over time, Akron bought up about 30 square miles of land in the Cuyahoga River watershed. Its 20,000 acres in Geauga County make it that county’s largest property owner. The city then dammed the river to create not one but two reservoirs, LaDue Reservoir and Lake Rockwell, to assure the city a nearly endless supply of water. Of necessity, most of the upstream area is forested and all of it protected, according to biologist Jessica Glowczewski, Akron’s current watershed superintendent. She
adds that close monitoring upstream assures it’s a very clean river feeding the second part of the water system, the water plant itself. The Kent operation is spread out over a half-dozen buildings or so. It is largely automated but has a staff of about 30 chemists and technicians who monitor every step of the process and keep things within established tolerances. All key systems have back-ups in case something breaks or the power goes out.
At Lake Rockwell’s edge, huge grates keep fish and other water critters out of the plant’s intake. Vegetation and silt are separated out and sent to a nearby landfill. The water is then dosed with chemicals to disinfect it and eliminate algae by-products and other organic matter. The operators then filter the heck out of the water and add trace chemicals to neutralize the pH and further purify it. Before heading out the 54- and 48-inch pipes to Akron, the plant adds a small dose of fluoride – the anti- tooth decay chemical – and orthophosphate to protect the distribution pipes. (Without that last step, we would have a Flint, Michigan situation.) It is those pipes, pumps and storage units that make up the third and final part of the system, which is monitored as closely as the first two. Like every public water works in the country, Akron’s entire process – from the watershed to drinking fountain – is highly regulated by the EPA. Four lab technicians at the plant constantly test its output and about 25 sites throughout the distribution get sampling visits once a week to assure there’s pure water throughout the neighborhoods. With tire production gone, Akron’s water system is now running at about half capacity, but still pumps out about 35 million gallons of pure water a day. It’s available from our faucets for about one-third of a penny per gallon. Bottled water costs about 1,000-times as much. Buying it for anything other than emergencies seems a little nuts now, doesn’t it? Not to mention the craziness of all those plastic bottles. Jeff Davis is a retired writer, editor, and teacher who actually got thirsty writing this story. He’s also a proud co-owner of this newspaper. He can be reached at jeffdavisds@gmail.com
The Devil Strip
| 23
