Clean Water Works
CLEVELAND, OHIO: From the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, an in-depth and fun conversation led by Donna Friedman and Mike Uva on any and all topics related to clean water, wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and the people, projects, and programs serving Lake Erie and our local waterways and communities.
Clean Water Works
Cleveland Water and Winter Weather Tips
Freezing temperatures can test our municipal water systems as well as the pipes inside our homes. Water Commissioner Alex Margevicius explains how the Cleveland Division of Water keeps 1.4 million people supplied with safe drinking water when temperatures plunge and aging water mains face their toughest days of the year.
From Cleveland's offshore water intakes to your homes and businesses, we trace the journey clean water makes and share some simple measures you can take to prevent frozen water lines and damage.
Here at the Sewer District, we often talk about the urban water cycle as it pertains to wastewater treatment: from residential use to our treatment plants and back to Lake Erie. Our conversation with Alex continues the water's route back in from the Lake and to our homes.
Visit Cleveland Water to learn more about tours, cost-saving programs, and household tips.
It's cold outside. Do you know how to winterize your home? Do you do any winterizing?
SPEAKER_03:No, the I would say the only thing that I do at my house is um shut the water off to my outside taps.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_03:If there's supposed to be something else that I'm doing, I'm not doing it. Just so we're allowed to do that. That's all I got.
SPEAKER_00:So we're going to talk about frozen water pipes and winterizing and how folks can protect themselves against costly repairs. Clean water works.
SPEAKER_03:Clean water works podcast about all things clean water. And who better to talk to about clean water than the commissioner of Cleveland Water?
SPEAKER_00:Alex Margavichus. Good to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. You have a very long career in clean water here in Cleveland.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I started uh 40 years ago. It was May 1985, a long time ago. Started as a uh entry-level engineer and uh gradually worked my way up. Um worked a long time with Julius Choc, um, who's a well-known name here at the regional sewer district. Former director here at the Sewer District, yes. Correct. And uh he was commissioner there. Um he appointed me at the tender age of 37 to the head of engineering at Cleveland Water, which I held for 16 years, and then in 2011 became the commissioner of water.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So you always have an interest in water and engineering?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so uh I, you know, all along in in in high school I knew some sort of STEM type career was where my bent was, and uh went to Case Western Reserve in engineering with a focus primarily in environmental engineering. And then after uh graduation, it was actually not an easy time to find work. Went a little bit out of field, went to work for General Electric, actually, writing software until I saw an ad in the paper looking for an engineer to work at Cleveland and responded to it and uh have been there ever since. Okay, so and happy I came. It's been an extremely fulfilling career. Um I folks ask me, and I say it is not a job, it's not even just a career, it's been mission, I say. You know, what better career can you have than helping bring fresh, safe drinking water to 1.4 million people in Northeast Ohio? Um very grateful for the opportunity to do that.
SPEAKER_03:That's remarkable. In your career, have you what changes are notable for you?
SPEAKER_01:Well, you know, when when I first started in the 1980s, the water system was nowhere near as strong as it is now. Demands were higher and the system was not as strong. We struggled at times to bring just basic fundamental water everywhere it needed to go, especially during summer peak times. We remember the drought from 1988 real well, which was kind of seared into our memories for those of us who were there back then. And it directed our program and our thinking about how to bring water service reliably everywhere. So uh it's been sort of a mantra of ours to make sure that we have high levels of reliability. One of our goals is to be able to take any single large element of the water service offline and continue to provide service everywhere. So the degree of reliability and redundancy in the Cleveland water system is much higher. I would say that's that's one of the greatest legacies in the time that I've been there that we've seen. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00:Was that a capacity issue or just things breaking down?
SPEAKER_01:Um a lot of both. You know, that is sort of at the time when the demand in the water system peaked. Since then, you have low-flow shower heads and washing machines, faucets, everything is much low flow. And so per capita demand has gone down in the last 20-some years, about 30-35 percent. Wow. So the demand is lower, the stress on the system, plus all of the capital improvements we invested over those years over a billion dollars in new infrastructure, transmission mains, pump stations, water towers, to bring water where we were struggling to bring it before.
SPEAKER_03:Something that folks probably don't really think about that much is that you are taking water from the lake and pushing it uphill.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly.
SPEAKER_03:And so you have a very pump-driven system.
SPEAKER_01:We do, um, as opposed to sewer, which to a large extent is gravity. If they flow downhill from the sources back to the lake in the river where we go the other way. Um the lake is our lowest spot, our elevation that we uh serve, and we have to pump it up to 800 feet above lake level in order to get it up there. Uh we're a large energy user. Uh almost$20 million is our electric bill every year, and about 80% of that is just pumping, pumping water up to 25 miles away and 800 feet up into the air. So it takes a lot of energy to do that.
SPEAKER_00:Here at the sewer district, we talk about the urban water cycle and the route that water travels throughout our system to eventually return to the lake. Talking from the water department's point of view, what's the route that water takes?
SPEAKER_01:That's exactly correct. Um our portion of it is we take it from the lake and uh treat it. We uh oversimplify sometimes in the water business, in the drinking water business by saying we focus on three things source, treatment, and distribution. I would say in my early days here, in the first 20 some years, we didn't think about the first element too much, source. We took it for granted, you know, as far as the lake being so plentiful, uh, good quality, didn't have to worry about it. Not since we do a tremendous amount of science trying to understand Lake Erie. I am always blown away by the new things that we continue to learn about Lake Erie. The physics, the chemistry, the biology of what goes on in that lake is just amazing. You know, some years ago, Toledo had the algae incident where people for three days could not drink water because of the toxins that are. Because of the toxins in algae, exactly right. So we measure algae content in the water that we bring in from the lake. And what surprised me in the dead of winter, when there were like six inches of ice on the lake, we took our samples in, and they're still algae growing. I would not have thought that. I would not have thought that you would see algae growing when the lake temperature is 33 degrees, for example, but it does. So uh the complexity of the lake is something, again, that we do not take for granted at all anymore. And so I guess that's part of our portion of the water cycle, if you will. And it is a water cycle. It it to a large extent is a matter of degree of separation. You know, there are other parts of the country that are talking about direct and indirect reuse where they take the wastewater product and immediately turn it into drinking water. In a sense, it is, in my view, a degree of separation. We have Lake Erie in between that softens the effect, if you will, of one use going into the next. But it that is all it is is a matter of degree. I think of the space shuttle, for example, where I tell folks where do you think they get their drinking water from up there? It's all recycled from human use up there.
SPEAKER_00:So how do you get the water from the lake?
SPEAKER_01:So we have four water treatment plants. Each one of them has their own separate intake. The iconic orange ring out in Lake Erie that you see is one of the four. It's the only one that is above water. The other three are submerged below the bottom of the lake. And uh, we are three and a half to four miles away from shore. We are farther away from shore, much farther away from shore than any other water system along Lake Erie. Everyone else is maybe half a mile out, roughly. We're three to four miles out. This was from hard lessons learned 120 years ago when we were getting cholera and typhoid deaths, when our intake was much closer to the effects of the Cuyahoga River and the human pollution that was causing. Um, so we pushed it much further out. Um, and uh the quality of the water that we pull in is is much better as a result. So uh at the four intakes that take the water in, the tunnels then descend vertically down 50 feet below the bottom of the lake. The lake water itself is about 50 feet. We go another 50 feet down and then horizontally tunnel towards shore. That orange intake that I talked about is nicknamed the five-mile crib. And even though it's maybe closer to four miles at the closest point, the tunnel runs at an angle to our Kirtland pump station, and the length of that tunnel is five miles long. So we bring the water there, it gets to the plants, we screen the water, if you will. There's zebra mussel shells, there's fish, there's other debris that may be in the lake that we filter out or screen out, if you will, as a big process, and then it gets pushed through the rest of the treatment process.
SPEAKER_00:Aaron Powell We have kind of similar processes too in some ways, right? I was reading you have uh a settling process just like we have a settling process.
SPEAKER_01:I certainly do. We use uh what most people consider a conventional water treatment process. It is tried and true. It has been around for hundreds of years, used in Europe and uh other parts, eastern party of the United States for a long, long time. Um it is the process that we adopted again back then, starting in 1917 and continued today. There are some other processes, other water systems use, but since we have so much infrastructure built already around the process that we have, it doesn't really make sense for us to convert to any sort of other system. So the water comes into us from the lake. The first thing we do is screen it for the big items. From there, we will typically pump it. If we have to lift it from lake level up to a higher elevation, and by there it flows through the entire water treatment plant by gravity. We add uh potassium permanganate up front as what's called an oxidant that hits and attacks the biological material that's in lake water and is essentially prepping it to put it in a state that it can effectively be treated. Many, many years ago, our initial oxidant had been chlorine. But as great as chlorine is in the drinking water business, and some people estimate that uh chlorine has had the benefit of increasing human lifespan by 10 years in the United States by making water that much better and safer to drink. Um, nevertheless, if you add too much chlorine, it can form byproducts, and those have been known to be carcinogenic and have other health problems. So we switched. We stopped using chlorine at the beginning of the treatment process. We use potassium permanganate instead to condition the water. The next step is settling. We add alum to the water, uh, aluminum sulfate. It sort of forms a large net on top of a large water surface. We push it into these huge underground, I call them swimming pools, big concrete huge tanks, and this alum net settles to the bottom of the tank and sweeps through, and biological matter and other matter in the lake attach to the alum. It's like a coagulant. Yes, it's a coagulant. Exactly. Same thing you guys do in some respects. Sinks to the bottom, and the water is much cleaner on the top now. I like to say maybe it's 40% done. Okay. And we basically take the water off the top of the settling basin. The uh solids have settled to the bottom. Then that water then goes into the filter building. It is roughly two feet of anthracite coal that sits on top of one foot of sand. The water wiggles its way through all those particles, and the smaller particles then affix and attach themselves to those particles of anthrocyte and sand, and the water that comes out of the bottom is far cleaner now than what went in through the top. So maybe it's now 90% done. We then send it into the finished water reservoir. And this is where we add chlorine now to disinfect whatever's left. But a new requirement that was added some 15 years ago or so was what's called contact time. The water before we send it out to the public must be in contact with that chlorine, typically about six hours to give the chlorine a chance to kill anything that's still maybe remaining in the drinking water before it goes out into the system. And so we had to retrofit some of our reservoirs to make it like a serpentine snake so that the water takes longer to get through before it comes out the far end. So the chlorine is doing its thing in killing it. Once it's through that entire process, it's now deemed safe and potable to drink. Uh, and we push it out into the distribution system. And we do so much water quality testing at our plants and in the distribution system. We do over a hundred tests a day on our water quality. A distinction we like to make between tap water and bottled water. Bottled water is controlled by the Food and Drug Administration. It's treated as a food, and they typically test maybe once a month. We're doing hundreds of tests every single day to make sure that the water is absolutely the safe as possible and great tasting and smelling and looking to all of our customers. Do you add fluoride too? We add fluoride. It's a little bit of a contentious issue. There are some folks out there who don't like the fact that fluoride is added. We are required by the state of Ohio, state law mandates that water systems in the state add fluoride for dental health. And every dentist I ever speak to are strong, strong proponents of it. They believe strongly in fluoridation and the benefits that it does for dental health. Um but nevertheless we do get some calls from customers who don't like it. And we tell them, well, your beef is really down in Columbus, you know, at the Statehouse. That's where the law would have to be changed if something were to be done.
SPEAKER_00:And there are four treatment plants.
SPEAKER_01:These date back to Um, as a matter of fact, one of them we just celebrated our hundredth birthday. The water system was born in 1856 at the site of our division plant, right next to your westerly treatment plant. And for our first 50-some years, we just pumped water out of Lake Erie and distributed it in an untreated way. Um that was the state of the art back then. Uh starting in 1917 at the Division Avenue plant, now named Garrett Morgan, um near Edgewater, we started modern filtration. We built a first-class water treatment plant there. The second plant was the Baldwin plant in 1925. And uh the other two plants on the farther edges of the system, the Crown and the Nottingham plant, those came live in the 1950s. Sort of part of the post-World War II boom, the population boom in the suburban areas, and those plants were needed to help bring water supply to the outer parts of our water system. We serve uh, in addition to the city, 79 other communities. All of Cuyahoga County, basically, and uh portions of four other counties get their drinking water from us. So a lot of pipes. A lot of pipes. 5,400 miles of pipe, 440,000 individual service connections, and by that measure we're the tenth largest water system in the United States.
SPEAKER_00:So you've got a lot of maintenance on all those miles of pipes.
SPEAKER_01:We do. We invest about$30 million a year in our distribution system to provide good service. And it's an older system, so there is a lot of maintenance that we have to be concerned about going forward.
SPEAKER_00:So talk about the challenges of the colder weather and uh the obstacles that your teams face when they're maintaining this vast system.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it was interesting. I just returned from Florida on Friday. I was there for a week, and uh my nephew sent a screenshot when it was 11 degrees here. You know?
SPEAKER_03:And you were like, I don't want to see that.
SPEAKER_01:So cold weather definitely has multiple effects uh on the water system. In the distribution system, as the temperature gets colder, we see an increase in water main breaks. There was great analysis done in the actually in the 1960s to explain why. I've always asked, wondered why that is the case. And the best science that I have seen suggests that as the cold weather gets more and more severe in the wintertime, the frost level in the ground descends deeper and deeper. It's kind of well known in Northeast Ohio that the depth of frost maybe gets down to three and a half feet or so down. Our water mains are six feet down so that they don't freeze and have issues with that. Nevertheless, that top three feet of frozen ground doubles the forces, the impact forces on the top of those water mains. And when those water mains that are maybe 80, 90, 100 years old, they're aging, they're getting weak spots in them, and those extra forces from that frost pushing on the pipe is like the straw to break the camel's back. That's the last thing necessary then that causes them to break.
SPEAKER_00:I always thought it was the water in the pipe.
SPEAKER_01:We we speculate on a couple other potential factors relating to that one in particular. Um, these pipes, the old ones especially, are made out of cast iron and metal contracts as it gets colder. And we do suspect that as the pipes get cold because of the cold water inside and the ground on the outside, that they may contract and joints may open up, for example. These pipes are like 20 feet in length, and there's a joint every 20 feet that as they contract, they may pull open a little bit. But again, to the best of our knowledge, it is the frost load from the surface that breaks the pipes. In the non-winter months, um, we have on average maybe about five water main breaks a day in the distribution system. Uh, it is a rate that is very common among older urban systems that are up in the cold climbs, if you will, a Boston, a Detroit, a New York, all see break rates similar to what ours is. But in the wintertime, that rate can double. We start to see really the effect, the ramp up of main breaks that happens maybe first, second week of January. And if it's a bitter, bitter, cold winter, like last one was, uh, we see a lot of breaks. I actually have a yin and yang in my department where our water treatment plant people, the water quality people, they like cold weather. When the lake gets frozen, they love that because the lake stays cooler longer and less algae growth to have to deal with in the spring and summer months.
SPEAKER_03:So the treatment's easier.
SPEAKER_01:The treatment is easier, but our people having to repair the water mains hate it. You know, so I get the arguments across the table.
SPEAKER_03:Somebody's knocking on your door.
SPEAKER_01:Correct.
SPEAKER_00:When some water lines break, there are very visible signs, right? There's water coming above ground. But how do you find out about breaks in general?
SPEAKER_01:I would say primarily. Uh, especially in the winter times like that, they will surface. They will surface. Occasionally, we may get a scenario where a group of customers are calling and saying, we have very low pressure. That's a good indication that there's a main broken somewhere. Then what we may have to do is try and pinpoint where that leak may be. We typically will then hit several fire hydrants in the area. Take a pressure, and wherever the pressure is the lowest, that tells you the main break is close there. And then we'll try and pinpoint. We use various uh acoustic techniques to try and locate where the leak may be at that point. Nothing amazing here to say that the older infrastructure breaks more. And the oldest infrastructure is in the city, in inner city in general, and the uh inner ring communities is where we see a lot of the breaks.
SPEAKER_00:So homeowners are experiencing breaks in their water lines in their homes. Do you get a lot of calls from residents?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we do. The mechanics of what happens is you get, as opposed to our water mains that are six feet underground, you may have a service connection going up the wall, okay, in an interior wall, for example, or through a crawl space, through a garage, for example, that perhaps is not heated, not insulated, or poorly heated, poorly insulated, and it freezes. And if there's no movement in the water at night, it can freeze solid. It may freeze, and if you're in a real cold snap, it may stay frozen and nothing is wrong until you start to get the warm-up. And the ice in that side inside that copper plumbing inside the home will then thaw. And when it does, the ice that had expanded cracked the uh copper tubing open, but nothing came out because it was solid ice in there. Once it thaws a week later, for example, then you get the gushing water that may occur. We have our system set up to look for unusual patterns. We have sent out well over 200,000 letters to customers over the years telling them something is going on. It appears you've got a leak somewhere. You ought to take a look at it. Uh, we especially tell customers if you've had it in the past, if you've had freezing pipes in the past, you really need to take some steps to try and address it. If there's a cold snap coming, um if it's, for example, a sink cabinet that has had an issue, just open the doors and let the warmer air get in there. When the water freezes into ice inside the plumbing, it's because there's no movement at all. We recommend if you think you're susceptible, just go somewhere in the house, ideally at the farthest spot from where the water meter is, and just run a pencil thin stream of water that keeps the water moving. So instead of it freezing, you're constantly refreshing it with water that's the 40 degrees or so and still several degrees away from the freezing point. That's enough. That's enough to prevent it.
SPEAKER_00:So even turning it on at one spot in your house will be.
SPEAKER_01:Certainly at the most likely it will move it at the spots that are susceptible to the freezing, which are typically at the lower levels of the home. I guess I would say if you know that there are multiple spots that you may be susceptible, then you may want to flow at a couple spots, if you will. One other thing that we strongly, strongly emphasize too, where the water comes into the house, up through the floor or through the wall, usually the water meter is there in residences. There's a shutoff valve right there. And it's prudent. You'd be amazed how many homeowners don't even know where it is or what it is. Become familiar with that thing. If you've got flooding water in that house, that's where you got to go. You got to go there and shut that thing off and stop the flooding inside your home. So we recommend folks know where it is. Maybe not right now going into winter, but in the summertime, maybe test it. You know, make sure that it works. That thing may not have been operated for 25 years, you know, and maybe it doesn't work when you really need it to. So check it in the summertime and then at for sure at a minimum, know where it is. Uh, we have literature that again in the in our website, kind of showing what they look like, it'd be a good thing for residents to check that out.
SPEAKER_00:And the website is Clevelandwater.com.
SPEAKER_01:Easy peasy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So aside from knowing where the shutoff valve is in your home, what are the next steps when there is a water break in a home? What should a person do? Like if their basement's flooding.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So you do want to get that shutoff. That to me is the main thing. Sometimes the damage may be such that maybe it's before that shutoff valve or the valve itself has frozen and burst, for example. Um, they can call us. Now it's a busy time for us too, um, but we'll do the best we can to get out there. And there is a shutoff valve also in the tree lawn, typically, of a home. So we come there and we can shut it off there. Uh, but then they'll have to hire a plumber to come in and and fix the repair. And it gets busy for them too. You know, it it's a disheartening situation if a customer has to deal with it for sure. So that's why we want to do everything we can to have folks take proactive measures so they don't have to deal with that. I had to deal with that with in my own house 15 years ago. Yeah. And if you know you have an area that is susceptible, you can attempt to insulate it, keep the cold off. You can do heat wrap. If you're in a scenario where, boy, the water pressure's getting really low, you know, but not zero yet. Maybe the ice is starting to build up in there. You can take a hair blower, for example, you know, and try and warm it up there. We do not advocate, however, taking an open flame torch or anything like that. You know, don't try this at home. No, I would not recommend doing that. But if there are safe things that you can do, a hairdryer, for example, uh, those kinds of things to help bring some warmth can help.
SPEAKER_00:Do you have other recommendations for homeowners for maintaining their water systems year-round or the things that we should be doing?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, so one of the things that sounds like what you're going to refer to perhaps is the aerator.
SPEAKER_03:Trevor Burrus, Jr.: The aerator. That's what that's called.
SPEAKER_01:Like the thing that the board aerators on sink faucets can collect particles on it. And so we do recommend that screw that thing off and rinse it off a little bit and replace it or place it back, you know, is is uh not a bad practice. And you know, valves are in homes for a reason. You know, every toilet has a shutoff valve. Underneath the sink, they have shut-off valves. So it's probably not a bad practice to exercise those every so often, just in case you do need it, you know, it's in a working condition. Sometimes if those valves are not operated for a long time, and then when you do need it and operate it, and then it'll start and develop a nasty drip on you, for example, that then you have to deal with that, and maybe not at the time you'd like to. You know, we do for the safety of consumption, we always recommend if you're drinking it, making food out of it, making a soup, doing anything like that, use the cold water. Use cold water always for cooking and consuming purposes. Don't use hot water. And why is that? Hot water can cause metals to leach out of the plumbing uh that are in there. Um, and the cold water won't do that. So we we do recommend that using the cold water is safer uh for that purpose.
SPEAKER_00:I think tap water here in Cleveland tastes really good.
SPEAKER_01:We agree. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:Have you been to other cities that have even better tasting water?
SPEAKER_01:I'll tell you one thing, my my thought on that. Is anyone keeping score? I don't know. I don't know. Who are our competitors in the past? Well, so I hear number one, I'm partial to our water. I uh you know, I have been around the country, a lot of places, and water conferences, for example, where they do taste testing events.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, that sounds fun.
SPEAKER_01:Well, one of the things I think when when people are getting a blind taste test of water samples in front of them and rating them, I do have a suspicion that a lot of people will rate highly water that tastes like what they're used to. Oh, yeah. Right? Yes, I I think that's the case. I think that's the case. So if you're if you're uh in a place that has really high chlorine levels, for example, maybe you're more tolerant of it. If you're from a place that doesn't, maybe not so much.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, so the judging is skewed, is what you're saying. Fair enough.
SPEAKER_01:So interesting, too, on on both taste and odor issues with drinking water, extremely highly subjective. Um you can put a panel of 10 people in, just picked off the street, and some people will say, Yeah, I can taste that chlorine in there. Others will say, No, I cannot. People's uh faculties are far different one from another.
SPEAKER_00:Do you offer tours at all of your facilities? We do. We do offer tours.
SPEAKER_01:Usually we need to get them set up in advance. We do have open house every year in May of every year as part of uh National Drinking Water Week. Go to Clevelandwater.com again, and there's some information there about how folks uh can get some tours.
SPEAKER_03:It's just really great to have you on and talk about the full circle of it all. You know, you taking the water from the lake, cleaning it, giving it to the to the people, us taking it back, cleaning it, putting it back in the lake.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's a very I think it's a very important partnership, frankly, between Cleveland Water and and Regional Sewer District. I I'm just thrilled with the great relationships we've had over the years uh with the district. It's been excellent to work with you guys.
SPEAKER_00:Alex Margevichus, Commissioner of Water for City of Cleveland. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for coming on.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, thank you so very much for having us today.
