The removal of roughly 11 football fields of contaminated sediment behind the Gorge dam, stacked 10 to 12 feet high, will open up recreations and economic opportunities, according to elected officials in Cuyahoga Falls.
The more than $130 million project has been decades in the making, part of a broader legacy of remediating pollution and other issues with the Cuyahoga River. It will also open up the waterfall that the city of Cuyahoga Falls was originally named for, said Mayor Don Walters, who was joined at the event by Governor Mike DeWine, congressional representatives and environmental officials.
"All our stationary has a picture of what we call the Cuyahoga Falls," Walters said. "It's known as the Big Falls. Well, no one alive has ever seen it. It's under the dam. So finally, when that structure comes down, we will see the structure that we were named after."
DeWine celebrated the project as an example of state, local and federal officials working together. The funding is coming from a wide mix, including the federal government, the cities of Akron and Cuyahoga Falls, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, electric utility First Energy and the state.
"We take today the first step to let the Cuyahoga River run free, this is something that we've talked about for decades," DeWine said.
The 850,000 cubic yards of sediment will be removed over the next few years, over to a site in the Chuckery Area of Cascade Valley Metro Park, with the end goal of the dam being removed by 2032, officials said. The sediment is full of contaminants like cadmium, lead and other heavy metals.
"My only request is when I'm in Cedarville and no longer governor, you guys can send me an invitation and I'll come watch you blow up the dam," DeWine said.
U.S. Representatives Emilia Sykes and Shontel Brown both spoke during the event. Sykes, who represents the Akron area, credited local activists like Friends of the Crooked River with advocating for the free flow of the river for years.
"Work continues to remove the environmental impairments and restore the river's full ecological health," Sykes said.
About 65% of the project's funding comes from the federal government, causing concern from some about what might happen to it amid massive cuts to federal spending. Anne Vogel, regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said Thursday that U.S. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin "knows and is committed to cleaning up this legacy contamination so that we can move forward here in this region."
The Gorge Dam is technically located in Akron, Walter said, but all of the sediment being removed is inside Cuyahoga Falls limits. He said he expects white-water rafting to become a major tourist attraction in the area once the falls are freed.
"The recreation, the kayakers tell me that we will have nothing close east of the Mississippi to what we'll have here for the whitewater kayaking," he said. "So we'll be building hotels, restaurants. All that stuff's gonna happen."
Officials said sediment removal should officially begin in the next two weeks. The Gorge Dam has been around since 1911, and is the last of a handful of dams to be removed from the river.
