Cleveland Public Water System

• The Baldwin plant sits on the site of the 80-million-gallon open-air Fairmount Reservoir, in use 1885-1904 at Stokes Blvd. and MLK Jr. Dr.
• Baldwin's own reservoir held 135 million gallons and was the largest in the world when it was built in the 1920s.
• The Morgan plant honors Garrett A. Morgan, the Black inventor of the gas mask and traffic signal, who used his gas mask to rescue workers in Cleveland's 1916 waterworks tunnel disaster.
• In 2024-25 Cleveland Water ran 646 tests for lithium and 29 PFAS compounds across all four plants and detected none of them.

• 1856Cleveland's first waterworks: a single pump station and 13 miles of mains delivering untreated Lake Erie water; a fountain on Public Square opened Sept. 24.
• 1918Division Avenue Filtration Plant and Pump Station opens near W. 45th St.; rededicated in 1991 as the Garrett A. Morgan Water Treatment Plant.
• 1925Baldwin Filtration Plant opens on the old Fairmount Reservoir site, delivering filtered water to all Cleveland Water customers for the first time.
• 1951-1958Nottingham plant (1951) opens for east/southeast customers and Crown plant (1958) on Clague Rd. in Westlake for west/southwest customers.
• 2023Cleveland Water launches a proactive Lead Service Line Replacement Program using federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding.

How it is treated

Lake Erie water from four offshore intakes is treated at Baldwin, Nottingham, Morgan and Crown with potassium permanganate and powdered activated carbon, coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, chlorine, fluoride, and orthophosphate corrosion control.

Water pressure

No average psi published. Four elevation-based pressure zones also set rates; 5 primary and 13 secondary pump stations, 22 towers/tanks, ~5,400 mi of main.

$3.13 per 1,000 gallons

2025 Cleveland residential: $9.85/mo fixed (5/8-1in meter); $23.44/MCF first 0.2 MCF, then $39.84/MCF. 1 MCF = 7,480 gal, so $3.13-$5.33 per 1,000 gal.

EPA compliance record

Lead at the tap: 90th-percentile result 0 ppb in 2024 (action level 15 ppb).

EPA record: no health-based violations since 2015.

1 violation of any kind logged since 2020, 1 of them paperwork (monitoring, reporting, public notice or consumer report).

Recent and current work

• Lead Service Line Replacement Program · 2023-present · under construction
  Federal BIL funding; ~4,000 lines/yr via the program plus ~2,000 with main work, about 6,000/yr total.
• Childcare facility lead line replacement · $2.5 million · 2021-2022 · completed
  H2Ohio funding replaced all lead service lines at licensed childcare facilities.

Planned or needed

• System-wide lead service line replacement · planned
  ~178,000 possible lead connections, 142,000 city-owned; at ~6,000/yr the utility expects a 25-year effort.

Lake Erie supply is ample. Cleveland draws from the central basin, less affected than the western basin where Toledo's 2014 microcystin crisis cut off ~400,000 people, but harmful algal blooms remain the regional treatment risk. UCMR5 found no PFAS at any of the four plants.

Sanitary

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD), not Cleveland Water, provides sanitary sewer service and wastewater treatment across greater Cleveland; NEORSD operates under a federal consent decree to reduce combined sewer overflows into the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie.

Storm

NEORSD runs a regional stormwater management program funded by a stormwater fee; much of Cleveland's older sewer system is combined sanitary/storm, the key driver of the CSO consent decree work.

Compiled from the utility's own reports and public records, then independently re-checked against primary sources.