This sewer, built in 1873, is still maintained and functional today.
The story of the oldest asset in northeast Ohio’s labyrinthian sewer system.
The year is 1873. In Cleveland, a tall and narrow sewer is being dug deep underground, built by hand, brick by brick, to move sewage. The work is hard. The need is great. The city is growing.
The year is now 2025, and that sewer, now more than 150 years old, is still in use today. We recently took a closer look at the oldest stretch of sewerage thanks to our maintenance crews who keep these pipes flowing.
Photographed by Sewer System Maintenance & Operation Operator/Technician Matt Barker during a routine inspection, he shed his gloves, leaving them hanging on the aging rungs to turn and capture the same pipe from the opposite direction. It’s a combined sewer, in amazing shape after more than a century.
Cleveland’s sewer network was constructed entirely as combined sewers in the city’s early decades that would carry stormwater and sewage in the same channels, flowing away from city centers and out towards the lake where treatment plants were later built in the early 1900s.
The wall in the middle is a regulator known as a weir. Since combined sewers carry stormwater and sewage in the same pipe, regulators ensure as much flow as possible receives treatment, directing flow in most conditions towards a treatment plant. But in heavy storms, flow overtops the weir and to the environment to prevent dangerous backups and flooding.
Stepping beyond the regulator wall, the condition looks even cleaner, despite the mineral deposits and hardened sediment lining the invert. This pipe’s life has been long because overflows happen less and less often in the decades since the 1970s. Our last five decades of investments have reduced untreated overflow volumes by billions of gallons annually.
The brickwork always amazes me. The skills of the hands that laid and mortared each brick in a long-past century continue to run through our workforce even now as maintenance crews make masonry spot repairs on these old systems today in an effort to maintain the structures’ integrity.
Sewers carry the remnants of our civilized life, washing them away as waste forgotten. But even in the murky darkness there is life — the life of human hands maintaining a century-old system, but more than that: Matt captured an image of spores sprouting from the mix of wastes deep in the darkness.
The year is 2025.
We are building sewers today that will outlive us all. Generations years from now will see its own workers exploring the depths, reminiscing and reflecting on the very hands and minds like ours and long before that made these systems possible.
Such is life.
