Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District Approach to Clean Water Act Integrated Planning

Following the USEPA’s establishment of the Integrated Planning Framework (IPF) that allowed communities and sewer agencies to use a comprehensive approach towards public health and water quality improvement planning, the Northeast Ohio Sewer District (NEORSD) embarked on using the IPF approach. It involved identifying and evaluating all Clean Water Act (CWA) related issues within the service area and prioritizing the best approach based on public health and water quality benefits. The NEORSD IPF evaluation involved two major areas, the first was a comprehensive review and analysis of NEORSD’s available data and previous study reports to assist in identifying the type and extent of existing CWA issues and to support cost-effective analysis of various types of corrective actions. The second, the development of an integrated hydrologic/hydraulic and water quality modeling tool for Lake Erie and its eleven tributary streams within the NEORSD service area. This included Lake Erie and tributary streams water quality monitoring/sampling of three storm events during the open beach season of 2014 and 2015. Among the main factors took into consideration during the development of IPF alternatives are public health impacts (direct exposure to bacteria due to basement flooding), pollutants of concern (POC) (bacteria, phosphorous and ammonia) discharge loads to Lake Erie and tributary streams, and wet weather sanitary flows to the Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs). This paper is more focused on the NEORSD’s approach to integrated planning than the results of the analysis.