The Queen City Waterline

For 200 years, Cincinnati has used technology and innovation to
provide residents with plenty of water. It hasn’t been easy.

By Dan Hurley

Today, regions organize their economic development efforts
around a cluster model. Rather than attempting to recruit any and every company,
ED professionals prefer building on the strengths of a region. It is not
surprising, given the long influence of P&G, that brand building and
consumer marketing is a critical cluster. And given our history of machine tool
manufacturing reaching back to the 1880s, we are also a center for advanced
manufacturing.

A third cluster rooted in our history that might be more of a
surprise is water technology. “Confluence,” the Ohio River Water Technology
Innovation cluster, has partnered with local waterworks, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, universities and several corporations to make Cincinnati the
base for a water technology innovation cluster.

Most Cincinnatians take for granted that they will have plenty of
water to sprinkle lawns and can always turn on their kitchen faucet and get a
glass of clean and safe water. Neither the quantity nor quality of our water
supply is the gift of nature. Cincinnati water is, in fact, a manufactured
product that is the result of almost 200 years of leadership, not just by one or
two brilliant individuals, but by an urban utility that has consistently been on
the cutting edge of innovation.

In 1817, Samuel Davis gained the exclusive right to “water the
city.” Davis’ company initially used a horse-powered pump, but in 1824 he
retired the horse in favor of a 40 horsepower steam engine salvaged from the
“Vesta,” the first locally-built steamboat. With steam power, Davis could pump
1.2 million gallons a day, but almost 50 percent leaked out of the system of
12-foot-long hollowed out log pipes before reaching a customer. The breakthrough
on the capacity issue came only after the City purchased the system from Davis
and acquired Nicholas Longworth’s “Garden of Eden” for a massive reservoir.

Solving the capacity challenge proved relatively easy compared to
solving the quality challenge. In the 1880s, scientists first postulated the
germ theory of disease with the discovery of bacteria and viruses. Not everyone
bought the theory. In the 1890s, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran articles headlined
“Water Pollution Germ Theory Dying Out” and “Ohio River Water is as Pure as
Heaven’s Snow” in a way that foreshadows modern global change deniers.

By 1907 the Cincinnati Water Works constructed a new treatment
complex upstream at the Village of California. The critical element of the
complex was the filtration building containing 28 rapid sand filters designed to
handle the heavily silted inland river water of the Ohio. When the California
complex went on line, Cincinnatians had treated water for the first time. The
health impact was immediate. Whereas 1,940 Cincinnatians contracted typhoid and
239 died from the disease in 1906, by 1908 only 234 cases and 64 deaths were
recorded, most of those traceable to contaminated milk supplies, raw fruits and
vegetables, or use of unfiltered water.

Work on water quality took another leap forward with the creation
of the Ohio River Valley Sanitation Commission in 1948. ORSANCO is a regional
pact dedicated to eliminating the dumping of untreated human and industrial
waste into the Ohio River and its tributaries in a drainage basin that spans
eight states. After the 1977 carbon tetrachloride spill at Industry, W. Va.,
ORSANCO also created an “organics detection system” to monitor and warn of
industrial spills.

In Cincinnati, the Water Works completed a new granular-activated carbon treatment plant in 1992 designed to remove organics that survive the rapid-sand filtration.
The plant, named for longtime Superintendent Richard Miller, made
Cincinnati the first city in the world to filter all of its water through
activated carbon on a daily basis, not just during water emergencies. And this
year, that technology has been supplemented with the introduction of UV
filtration designed to inactivate pathogenic microorganisms, such as
Cryptosporidium (crypto). Again, Cincinnati is on the cutting edge.

This long history of institutional leadership in water technology
by hundreds of engineers at the Greater Cincinnati Water Works, in combination
with the experience of ORSANCO and the presence of the water research division
of the U.S. EPA in Clifton, makes our area the perfect incubator for innovative
water technologies. Hopefully, all this activity will produce new high tech
companies and jobs that will make Cincinnati a water technology innovation hub.

Dan Hurley is a historian and the Director of Leadership
Cincinnati for the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber.