Clean Water Works
CLEVELAND, OHIO: From the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, an in-depth and fun conversation led by Donna Friedman and Mike Uva on any and all topics related to clean water, wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and the people, projects, and programs serving Lake Erie and our local waterways and communities.
Clean Water Works
Clean Water Superheroes: The Lake Erie League
A new crew of superheroes, the Lake Erie League, is turning everyday systems into comic-book stories for kids and teachers to use in the classroom. Across eight origin tales, these northeast Ohio-inspired characters mirror very real aspects of the Sewer District's work, from massive tunneling machines whose creations tame storm overflows, to a miniaturized lab technician who can detect toxins no human eye could witness.
We start with Mackenzie, inspired by the tunnel boring machine behind Project Clean Lake, who illustrates how infrastructure projects matter underground and on the surface. Spectra brings lab science to life with tests that our students can replicate in class, while Rover and Dr. Tao tackle sewer and stream inspections and the microscopic world of water quality. Botanica's story is rooted stream protection, restoration, and sustainability, and Vis and Overwatch round out the Lake Erie League with CSI-style adventures as seen from the field -- and above it.
Teachers can request print copies of the new comic book for their classrooms and access the stories and activity sheets at neorsd.org/league.
Meet the Lake Erie League creators:
Joe Sieracki, writer
Miguel Hernandez, illustrator
Did you know that Mike Goob is traveling the world and so he won't be at your Halloween party?
SPEAKER_01:Where are you gonna be? I'm going cross country for three weeks. Playing bass in my friend's band. That is we're going to California.
SPEAKER_00:It's really unfair.
SPEAKER_01:You're like a literal rock star.
SPEAKER_03:He's on tour. Do you need a groupie? Donna and I can like show up at every show and be like, yeah, we're on tour. What's the name of the band? Good morning Valentine. Okay. It's such a good name. We're going on the Good Morning Valentine USA tour.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Mike, before you go on your road trip, we have one more podcast we have to get out of the way. And by get out of the way, I mean it's just an honor to have you here with us today, Danny Nealin. Um, this is the Sewer District's podcast, Clean Water Works, our podcast about all things clean water. Danny.
SPEAKER_03:What's going on? Hi. Hi.
SPEAKER_00:I'm so glad you're here.
SPEAKER_03:I have never been on the podcast before. Danny Nealan is what's your title?
SPEAKER_01:Famous strategic partnership lead. Danny Nealin's a strategic partnership lead in the communications and community relations department here at the Sewer District.
SPEAKER_03:That's right.
SPEAKER_00:And before that, we worked together kind of.
SPEAKER_03:Sort of.
SPEAKER_00:For a minute.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. We were both in WQIS Environmental Assessment.
SPEAKER_00:But you have your PhD because you fancy.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I'm not that fancy.
SPEAKER_00:You're pretty fancy.
SPEAKER_03:I try.
SPEAKER_01:That's a big deal. I don't know. Have we had we've had a couple PhDs on the We're here to talk about a project that has occupied our imagination and schedules for the last three years.
SPEAKER_03:I don't think we had any sort of idea that it would turn out this incredible.
SPEAKER_01:But I remember it being like we need to have new materials for middle school kids because we've got some activity books for kids, like young kids, but nothing really for teenagers. Right. We're like, oh yeah, what are the kids into these days? What are the kids into these days?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. The adults are loving it too. They're they're being drawn back kind of into a nostalgia era of reading comic books, getting in touch with more physical media versus digital, and people really like flipping through the comic books.
SPEAKER_01:For those of you in the listening audience who are unfamiliar with this new initiative. Initiative, really, yeah, at the sewer district. This is the Lake Erie League. And this is a cast of superheroes, kind of like the Justice League, who are all working together to protect this wonderful natural resource we have in our backyard, Lake Erie, and the streams and the Cuyoga River and all the different waterways. And each of the characters kind of ties into a different aspect of the sewer district's work. If you've been listening to this program over the last three years, we have talked about a lot of different areas within the sewer district that don't have anything to do with the actual water going through the pipes, right? We have a laboratory, we have water quality, industrial surveillance, monitoring the waterways and the fish and bug populations. So we wanted to capture all of these different stories so that we would be able to explain to middle school kids about our work.
SPEAKER_03:It's interesting that the way you brought that up because it's important for people to understand that, yeah, we're more than just wastewater treatment plants. It takes a lot more to do the work of clean water than just, you know, some pipes heading to a building and a few people to turn some levers. It's not that simple. And so when you take one of our tours or you briefly see us, you might think it's it's pretty easy, right? And it's not. It's a combined effort, tons of training, tons of hours, tons of equipment, scientists, engineers that make this possible. And it's evolved over, you know, 50 years for us, but hundreds of years as a society in perfecting wastewater treatment. And still we have so much work to do. Um, and so it's really important that these characters represent not just the waste stream and cleaning the water, but all the different aspects, like you said, of the work, because we need um someone to get the samples, and then we need someone to analyze the samples, then we need someone to do something about the results, right? And those three careers have to work together. And so when we're working with middle school kids, those are the skills they're learning, right? Teamwork, problem solving, research, thinking out of the box. And so a lot of the programs we see that were reaching out to us for work, we're asking, how can we get kids thinking in STEM? How can we get them thinking big quick pick picture questions or what they call tricky problems or wicked problems, where kids are given something that's mostly unsolvable and like let's think out of the box to get there. And so these characters really do that throughout the stories as they're calling one another, they're saying, Oh, I gotta call Spectra, I gotta call Mackenzie, we're gonna need to teamwork this out. And that's why I think it makes it so perfect to not only teach the work that we do and why it's important, but then also help pull in the soft skills that the teachers are trying to get them to go over and blend the two together. So now we can use our characters to teach those kids about the things that will make you successful if you wanted to pursue a career in clean water, right? It's not just knowing about what we do and how we do it, but it's actually being able to work with others, right? It's a really cool way to get that message out there.
unknown:Cool.
SPEAKER_03:We did a lot of school programming, and kind of the thing we always took with us was this Wally book, right? This Where Does It Go book. Wally water drop. Wally water drop. Yeah. Mascot for the sewer district.
SPEAKER_00:The OG.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the OG. And the Where Does It Go book was really just getting the basics of the water cycle out there. Um, we would do kind of an in-classroom activity and then leave the students and the teachers with books, and they were kind of like a rainy day, you know, recesses canceled, work on your Wally books. We were looking for something that we could really bring to the classroom, use, have the kids work with it, understand what we do, and use those subjects discussed in the book, and then actually bring them into the classroom real-world activities or connect them to curriculum, like make them a little bit more um meaningful and memorable and tangible to the students.
SPEAKER_01:The writer of these stories is Joe Saraki, he's a high school science teacher, and he worked in collaboration with Miguel Hernandez, who is a local illustrator as well as an art teacher. Uh so the two of them, in collaboration with our team here at the sewer district, came up with these eight initial characters to be the introduction to the Lake Erie League. And then along the way, we introduced some villains as well. This is a comic book. It's a 40-page comic book, and it contains eight origin stories. So talk about McKenzie.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Um, so before we do that, I also want to say you'll notice there are human and non-human characters, right? And so some of the non-human characters, um, McKenzie being kind of the flagship one, really are about the tools that we use to get our work done. But then also, you know, it's important to remember the people behind them, right? That that got them there and that did that work. And so Mackenzie being kind of that flagship character, like I said, was kind of in existence prior to the creation of the comic book. McKenzie was named after the big tunnel boring machine, the TBM that dug the Euclid Creek tunnel, which was also named Mackenzie. We're digging these tunnels underground to store that combined sewer overflow, and that is going to not only protect the water quality of our rivers and streams, but ultimately Lake Erie, where all that water was ending up. Um, and it's a really good introduction point to talk about massive civil infrastructure that takes a long time. Through McKenzie's work, we are able to really connect students to our project Clean Lake, the CSO reduction, um, and really get all those conversations started because, like you said, that's taken up the huge majority of our projects and the work that we do. And so it's a it's been such a forward-facing, very public construction. Yeah, very visible. Yeah, very visible um when we have to move the tunnel boring machines. I mean, people are taking pictures over the overpasses and you know, we're stopping traffic to get this thing going through here. And then, of course, obviously during COVID, we had all of Amberla Park torn up. Um, we've had the East 55th site torn up for um Shoreline, and so there have been a lot of really visible um construction projects, and people want to know what we're doing there and why we're taking so long and why we're spending so much money. Um, and we can tell that story through Mackenzie.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and the next character, I think, is my favorite, although everyone who knows me knows I'm partial to dogs, but I think just the origin story of Spectra is really cool. I like that she in the intro story is like angstily listening to her music while working in the lab. And I just very much relate to that. Mike, do you want to tell us a little bit more about how you guys came up with Spectra?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we wanted to feature the lab. Definitely uh another really cool aspect of our work, and and people get a chance to learn about the lab generally at our open house in September each year. Uh you can take a tour of the lab and learn about all the different testing that we do. And we thought it would be cool to feature uh some of the equipment of the lab. Right. Uh specifically something called a mass spectrometer. That's right. So the character of spectra is named after this piece of equipment, which is, I don't know, maybe you can explain what a mass spectrometer is. We've discussed it on the program before.
SPEAKER_03:The LCMS, it takes a water sample, splits it up into its component parts, and then, you know, using, and there's various types of them, but basically using light or electromagnetic spectrum shot at these chemicals, they read the signature that comes back from the chemicals and it can tell you presence and absence and also uh concentration of particular chemical in the sample. So whether that's a metal or a pharmaceutical or whatever you're testing for. Um and so it's a very um well-known machine in the water quality industry, but probably mostly unknown to folks outside of our industry that don't know that's how we actually test the water. And we do so quite frequently, you know, every day that lab's cranking 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There's a sample somewhere in the process, um, even on holidays. And I think a lot of people take that, kind of take that for granted, and that's why I think it's such an important story to tell.
SPEAKER_01:So, an introduction to the different testing um processes in the laboratory, and also hearkening back to other comic book stories or superheroes, there's these origin stories where there's some kind of accident that's always a lab, right? Always a lab accident. I want to stress that our labs are incredibly safe. And they have a great safety record. In this case, uh the scientist is transformed into this superhero through a lab accident.
SPEAKER_03:One of the things I really like about her too is if you look at this panel where she's being transformed, you see it's all the different colors of the rainbow. And something else, and this is what we use in the classroom, is um also we use color metric testing. So if you have a sample, if you add a reagent to it, it might change a color, whether it's blue or red. The one that everybody's probably really familiar with is pH, right? So if you you can get a pH from the color of your sample, and that's the activity that we can use Spectra for in the classroom and actually connect the character to what the students are doing and say, because you're able to see the color change. That's what you know, Spectra does, and that's her superpower. And a lot of people will be familiar with that if you have ever seen a pool being tested at home or in the municipal pools or whatever, people adding drops to see if there's chlorine in the water. And that's something our folks do every day, even in the field. And so I think it's really cool that this character in particular is something that students can actually do, right? They can be hands-on and say, okay, I'm gonna be spectra right now, do this test and see what my result is.
SPEAKER_01:In addition to the comic book itself, we've also developed some curriculum materials like worksheets and things that talk about these different experiments that the students will be doing, like pH testing. Right. It's one component in uh a series of educational materials for middle school kids. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I just really like the art too. I think the art um in her story is just really amazing and does a great job at capturing kind of how the mass spectrometer works with using light.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, Miguel did a great job. He's done a number of graphic novels, and we'll post those in the show description, as with Joe Saraki, the writer, has also worked on a number of graphic novels, and so we'll we'll point you in their direction. Actually, in this story, we have a villain. That's right.
SPEAKER_00:Well the wipe is scary. Yeah. The wipe looks like a mummy with stick antlers and is very scary and tall and intimidating.
SPEAKER_03:Why is this villain called the wipe? Is um wet wipes, right? And it seems like such an innocuous thing. Um, they don't break down, even the ones that say they're flushable, right? They're made of a firmer material so that you can use them as a baby wipe or what have you. But our processes are so fast in the sense that that water is moving very quickly through the system, it's getting to a plant or to a bar screen, right? Which is a piece of infrastructure that's supposed to catch debris like sticks or large, easily removable things, but instead the wipes get trapped there before they have a chance to break down. They wrap around things, they bind with other wipes, they bind with our fogs, our fat soils and greases. And so they can become these major obstructions, especially not only in our big pipes, but in your own home plumbing, right? And so if you're thinking about saving money on utility management and repair, you really don't want to be sending those down. So the wipe is a perfect way to get kids thinking about, you know, am I creating the wipe by repeatedly flushing these things down, right? Um and if you ask our SSMO crew about how much time they spend removing wipes, removing debris, unwrapping rags from propellers, I mean, or impellers, I should say, um, in pump systems, it's really it's a really huge maintenance cost for us. And it it impacts our rates ultimately.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_03:Villainous. Villainous, super villainous.
SPEAKER_01:So we have a canine superhero.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. I think he's he's one of my favorites.
SPEAKER_01:But uh cyborg dog called Rover.
SPEAKER_03:Rover. The inspiration for this was our sewer system maintenance and operation team operate a video truck, and when they're doing inspections, rather than first, you know, sending someone down when they can avoid that, they can lower this video truck that goes through the sewer system, has a camera on it, can be moved in all different directions, and has a live feed so that they can see what's going on down there before or in lieu of having to send someone. And we also have one of these in our water quality and industrial surveillance team, which uses these to inspect illicit discharge detection and elimination. So I'll be interested to see the evolution of Rover's character. Maybe it's like a Scooby-doo, scrappy-doo situation where you've got like a couple of them running around. Um these are robot cameras that we drop down into the sewer pipes to see what's going on. Right. And it's safer for our folks rather than entering confined spaces and risking, you know, all the associated dangers that come along with that.
SPEAKER_01:And Rover belongs to one of the other characters, Dr. Tao. Dr. Tao.
SPEAKER_03:Right. What's his story? So he has this little mishap with a shrink ray. Another lab accident. Another lab accident. Womp womp. Um but he helps us, you know, with him shrinking down, right? Helps us tell the stories about the invisible. On the one side, on the treatment side, you've got microscopic bugs, um, you know, protozoans, different organisms that are breaking down suspended solids. But then you also have those suspended solids themselves, which are at the microscopic level. So we're talking about the bacteriological wastewater, organics, all those little things that eventually get broken down. And so Dr. Tao is just kind of a vehicle for us to talk about what we're really getting at with wastewater treatment, is all that microscopic stuff that we need to get out that you can't see. But then that also goes to some of the other chemicals that end up in our waste stream. Like I said before, pharmaceuticals or illegally dumped chemicals. Dr. Tao, if you'll see in the story, spots some pollution that we can't see with our naked eye, and then he can pull in spectra to help him figure out what it is and then ultimately um treat it. So it's very useful to kind of talk about those concepts.
SPEAKER_00:So one of our other characters, uh Botanica, her origin story starts when she's taking a water quality sample from a stream, and we do stream sampling through our water quality and industrial surveillance groups to see how the bodies of water that we discharge into are reacting to that discharge. So we clean the water as best we can from the wastewater treatment plants. And for example, the southerly wastewater treatment plant gets discharged into the Cuyahoga River, um, westerly and easterly discharge into Lake Erie. And so our water quality samples help us to see what the impact is. But in this story, um Botanica Barbara, she uh is in the water and and becomes transformed from an illicit substance that's been dumped into the stream.
SPEAKER_01:She's kind of a hybrid too, like rover, right? She's part human, part plant, part plant.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Yeah. And one of the the features, because Botanica was one of the first um that got created too, was really using her to talk about our green infrastructure uh programs. And so, you know, I'm sure you've talked about this on the show, but we have these massive green infrastructure installations that were part of Project Clean Lake that we use to help capture stormwater and give it some treatment before it gets to the stream, catch pollutants, catch, you know, just trash in general, but then also have all these trees that help slow the flow down before the water goes into the stream. And so some of the concepts you see with Botanica is not only is she pulling in that, you know, trees, botanical uh aspect of herself to be an effective member of the Lake Erie League, we also use trees to get that to get our work done, whether um it's at many of our sites and leaving behind something beautiful for kids to play in, or trees that are actually part of the clean water infrastructure. And so it's an opportunity for us to talk about sustainability and how we can work in the community to enhance sustainability efforts because ultimately those result in reduced water pollution.
SPEAKER_01:She also has this ability to communicate with nature. This is one of her new superpowers, right? She can hear what the trees are saying. Right. And so being able to learn from nature about what's going on, like as we do with the bug and fish sampling to see how clean the water is.
SPEAKER_03:Right, exactly. And we can get kind of an understanding of how our efforts are progressing based on improvements to those fish and bug populations. And you know, botanica would is the perfect character to talk about why we do that. Um we also use those samples um or those teams to suss out illicit discharge. Uh people dumping stuff. People dumping stuff. Yeah. I was just trying to figure out a way to say that politely. But yeah, so ultimately sometimes we have some bad actors. Um, but also a lot of times we just have people or situations that we just happen to uncover that are legacy problems, right? And so legacy pollution is a big part of our water quality fight and IDDE, so illicit discharge detection and elimination is a big part of tackling that, those legacy problems. So, for example, if 30, 40 years ago they built a housing development and the builders just um connected to the first pipe that they came to in the street, that may have accidentally been the storm sewer, not the sanitary sewer. And so we work very closely with the um Board of Health who samples a lot of those storm outfalls all summer, and they'll let us know if any of those outfalls have really high levels of E. coli or bacteria, um, which then triggers our teams to go out and trace those outfalls, see where are they coming from. Is it a neighborhood? Is it a shopping center? Is it a housing development? Because a lot of times it's a cross-connection, very innocuous. It's not done intentionally to cause problems, um, but it does have a huge impact on water quality at the very local level. They just plugged into the wrong pipe. Correct. They just plugged into the wrong pipe. Now, occasionally we do have industrial um problems, right? Where somebody's dumping something they shouldn't, or they're washing a drum out. That pollution could be very colorful or what have you, someone calls it in, and then we're tracing that up the stream. And so Donna and I got to had the pleasure of working on those when we were in water quality. And they can be, it's very sewer CSI, right? And that's why I kind of really like Viz too, because he's got that kind of investigatory like, I'm gonna solve this problem, I'm gonna get to the bottom of it. And it's very satisfying work, too, because you really can't put a pin in something and say, I fixed that problem. I figured out where it was and I fixed it, and I directly reduced water pollution. Um, so it's a really cool job and it's a very cool team, um, very dedicated folks that do that work.
SPEAKER_00:And Viz uh Viz's origin story brings in a new villain named Dumper.
SPEAKER_01:The dump.
SPEAKER_00:Who looks like Mike Wazowski, but like really tall.
SPEAKER_01:And the name says it all, right? Dumper is out just dumping away.
SPEAKER_00:Where did Dumper get these chemicals?
SPEAKER_03:I think we'll learn more about Dumper in a future.
SPEAKER_00:Does Dumper have like a plating shop?
SPEAKER_03:Maybe. Oh God. No uh dogging the wonderful folks that you know. Everybody needs something. Just rust out running. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, we need chrome plating for the pro-industry anti-dumper. Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And Viz actually calls in Overwatch, who is our second animal.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, cyborg animal friend. Some of the first um illustrations we had that came out of Overwatch and especially being over like the Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant were so cool because if you spent time down there, you'll see the eagles. Oh, yeah. The juvenile eagles fly down over the plant.
SPEAKER_01:We have real bald eagles flying over our southerly plant. Uh Overwatch has an incredible ability to see very far.
SPEAKER_03:Not just see far, but also like see problems. I think a lot of what we're talking about with students with Overwatch is our monitoring systems throughout our service area. And so we have a number of systems. Not only do we have the plants being monitored constantly, sensors throughout the plants and the collection system to monitor flow, pH, you know, some of your basic chemical parameters. But then we have all sorts of equipment that helps us make sure that, you know, we're not only staying in compliance, but that everything's working the way it's supposed to. So flow monitoring. Flow monitoring and sensors and rain gauges throughout the system. We've got programmable logic controllers, right? That's how our gates open up and down. So all of the ways that we stay in compliance. And I think Overwatch helps tell that story that data is really, really important, that we make our decisions based on real science, real data, observations and observations. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And finally, we have a character that kind of lets us talk about the origin of the sewer district. Yeah. The 1969 River Fire that sparked an environmental movement across the country, right? Yeah. This character at first appears like it might be uh a villain, but in fact is a key member of the uh the Lakerie League. And this character's name is Carl. Carl. Love Carl Carl from Cleveland. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:I mean, I didn't know, I don't think the Carl Stokes connection was like the initial. I just thought it was interesting because I'm like, that's interesting. We didn't plan that. No, and there was another Carl who was also enraged by a river fire.
SPEAKER_01:That's a completely unintentional um connection. But Carl Stokes was uh champion. A champion of uh cleaner waterways um following the river fire. Well, even before that, probably. Yeah. Anyway, Carl's story, Carl's a uh aquatic creature who is yeah, fish man enraged at the treatment of our natural resources, especially the river fire in 1969. And so he initially is plotting some sort of revenge on the humans that polluted his waterways, but ultimately comes around to an understanding that he has to and it was Botanica who who kind of saves him, right?
SPEAKER_03:Not to give everything away, but yeah, yeah. Oh man. Sorry, spoiler alert. When I think about Carl is very similar to what I said about Botanica. You know, we don't do this work in a vacuum. We are doing this work, and a lot of the um decisions we make is in response to how the environment responds to what we did. So if we do a stream restoration and we're not seeing fish populations rebound, we ask ourselves, okay, what's next? What do we need to do differently? So we're looking at the environment, seeing if there's a problem or if it's responding to the decisions we're making. Um that's why I think Carl is so cool because he's kind of that represents that piece of the work.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's an introduction to the, I'll just say the initial eight superhero characters in the Lake Erie League. There may be more at some point, but this is our current offering for middle school curriculum and kids age one to 99, you know, and wants to learn a little bit more about the different aspects of the uh sewer district's work, can get their own copy of the Lake Erie League.
SPEAKER_03:You know, we have a stash of them here. So if you're a teacher or an educator and you want to get your hands on a bunch of copies for your classroom, reach out. You can go to our community page at nursd.org slash community, and there's some links there for ways to get in touch with us and and make some requests. Also, all of the stories are available online too. So if you don't, um if you with activity pages too? Yes, the activity pages are there as well. So that's nursd.org slash league. League, L-E H G U E. That's right.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we had a lot of fun developing this comic book over the last three years, and with the help of uh Miguel Hernandez, the illustrator, and Joe Saraki, the writer, we've come up with a uh really useful and entertaining, I think, product for our communities to learn more about our work.
SPEAKER_00:I just love that kids are going to be able to read this and use it going forward. I think that's great.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks again, Danny, for coming on and talking about this. Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was fun.
