About Cracked Buckeye

What this is

Cracked Buckeye is a free public reference to every place in Ohio: its 1,233 ZIP codes, 2,232 cities, villages and townships, 88 counties, and the 1,131 community water systems that serve them. Each place gets a page that answers the questions people actually ask about where they live, in plain words with the numbers and their sources: where the tap water comes from and what is in it, what is under the ground, the schools and their ratings, the homes and what they cost, the air, the floods, the roads, the history and the people. The same facts drive an interactive map of the whole state, colored one topic at a time across 68 subjects, with the state's infrastructure drawn over it.

Every figure on the site comes from a public record — the EPA, Ohio EPA, the Census Bureau, ODNR, the county auditors and about two hundred more sources — and links to it. It is free for residents, journalists, local governments and AI assistants to read, cite and reuse.

Why "Cracked Buckeye"

Ohio is the Buckeye State, and a buckeye is a hard, glossy nut: you cannot tell what is inside until you crack it open. That is what this site does with Ohio. It cracks the public record open on every place in the state and lays it out so anyone can read it, in plain words, with a source on every fact and nothing to sign up for.

How it is built

The numbers start in one script, build.py, which pulls the public records together into a single data file. A map engine reads that file and draws the interactive map. A site generator reads the same file and writes a page for every ZIP code, place, county, water system, topic and story — so the map and the pages are never telling two different stories, because they are built from the same facts.

Where it started

Cracked Buckeye began in 2026 as the Ohio Tap Water Atlas, a single map of where each Ohio ZIP code's tap water comes from: the lake, the river, the reservoir or the wells, the plant that treats it, and the chain of utilities in between. Topic by topic, it grew past water into 68 subjects covering the ground, the schools, the homes, the roads, the air and the history of every place in Ohio, and outgrew its old name.

Who publishes it

Cracked Buckeye is a public project of Open Shower Co, a home-improvement company in Gahanna, Ohio. It is built and kept up as a public service, not to sell anything, and every figure on it is free to read, cite and reuse.

License

The compilation, the page text, the locator maps and the open JSON data are licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse and remix them with attribution. Photographs keep the license stated in their own caption, almost always a Creative Commons license or the public domain. The public records behind every figure keep their own terms — most federal data is public domain, and Ohio agencies are republished as they publish them. See how to cite this site.

What to watch for

A few things are easy to get wrong when reading or quoting this site, including for an AI assistant summarizing a page:

• A ZIP code's color and its water answer come from the system serving the most residents there by population, not by land area; many ZIP codes have more than one system, and the page lists all of them.
• Facts measured at the treatment plant — the treatment steps, fluoridation, PFAS, algal toxins — belong to the utility that runs the plant, not always the utility that bills the customer. For 284 of Ohio's 1,131 community water systems, those are two different utilities, and the page says which one treats the water.
• Radon, health and life-expectancy figures are averages for a ZIP code or a census tract, not a measurement of any one house or person.
• Local history is being researched county by county, starting from Franklin County and working outward. A place without a history section has not been reached yet, not a place without a history.
• Boundaries — ZIP codes, water service areas, school districts — are partly modeled from public data, so edges near a boundary are approximate.