The Great Lakes Water Wars by Peter Annin

Author:Peter Annin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2018-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

After an extended period of political arm-twisting, the city got the water rights it was looking for. On May 17, 1911, the Ohio legislature passed a bill declaring that Akron “and the inhabitants thereof” had the right to “divert and use forever” the waters of the “Tuscarawas River, the Big Cuyahoga and Little Cuyahoga rivers…. The governor, upon behalf of the state, shall execute and deliver to the city of Akron … a grant of the right to use forever the waters of such streams, as herein provided.”6 Governor Judson Harmon then drafted what is referred to as the “governor’s deed”—a document that mimicked the language in the 1911 legislation and essentially served as the legal title to Akron’s water rights. Not long thereafter, Akron broke ground on a reservoir that would later become known as Lake Rockwell, which remains the city’s chief water source (see map page 187).

But Akron’s plan to grab water from the Cuyahoga upstream and pipe it ten miles south rattled several towns that lined the section of the river between Lake Rockwell and Akron. There were times when the Cuyahoga’s flow was low or unpredictable, and officials from these towns worried that Akron’s pipeline bypass might leave their communities wanting for water during low-flow times of year. In 1913, the community of Cuyahoga Falls challenged the governor’s deed in court. Like other communities sandwiched between Akron and its proposed dam, Cuyahoga Falls worried that the exclusivity of the governor’s deed might prompt Akron to someday take all the water in the river. But Akron won that case, and during subsequent years, the city repeatedly won several other court challenges to its unique water right. The Lake Rockwell reservoir was completed in 1915, with a capacity of 2.3 billion gallons. In later years, it was followed by two other reservoirs constructed farther upstream: the 1.5-billion-gallon East Branch Reservoir in 1939, and the 5.9-billion-gallon Wendell R. LaDue Reservoir, in 1962.

This Cuyahoga Valley reservoir system is just one piece of an elaborate puzzle that makes up the complicated water matrix in the greater Akron area. To the northeast of the city lies Lake Rockwell and the rest of the city’s 10-billion-gallon reservoir system. To the south is a state-run lake and reservoir system known as “the Portage Lakes.” The area was home to a well-known Native American canoe portage path connecting the Great Lakes Basin to the Ohio-Mississippi River watershed. Akron sits on the rim of the Great Lakes Basin, and is where the 250-mile Ohio and Erie Canal, completed in 1832, crossed the watershed line. The canal made it possible to ship cargo by boat from Montréal to New Orleans without ever having to touch the ocean. Canal commerce fueled the economy in Akron and much of northern Ohio. But two centuries of water engineering have blessed Akron with one of the most complex water systems in the Great Lakes region.

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