On a steamy Monday night in 1916, G.H Fuller of Lake Avenue was disturbed by the sound of whistles drifting across the water of Lake Erie. According to an article in the Cleveland Leader two days later, Fuller alerted the U.S. Lifesaving Station, which sent a boat to investigate after it received two additional calls. In the ensuing hours, heroes were forged and lives lost in a frantic rescue attempt four miles from shore.
Background
The story of the Waterworks Tunnel Explosion of 1916 began in the early 1800s as Cleveland’s population boomed. According to John Stark Bellamy’s book, “They Died Crawling and Other Tales of Cleveland,” by the mid-1800s, the water along Cleveland’s shoreline was too polluted for human use. To stem water-borne illnesses, the city installed a 300-foot-long cast-iron pipe that could be used to draw clean water into the city from a depth of 12 feet. As the city grew, so did the pollution and additional, longer tunnels were needed. By the time work began on Tunnel #5 in 1914, roughly 70 men had died in Cleveland’s underwater tunnels.
At the time of construction, Tunnel #5, which still provides water for the city of Cleveland today, was a “state-of-the-art” feat of engineering. Bellamy writes that the tunnel itself consisted of a pipe made of interlocking concrete blocks with a diameter of about 10 feet. Above the tunnel rested 40-50 feet of earth and 128 feet of water.
Tunnel workers, known as “sandhogs,” reached the tunnel via an elevator that descended from an island-like crib through a 100×100 square foot steel shaft and deposited them at the entrance to an airlock. While working, 85 men lived on the crib, often for several months at a time. Their lives consisted of eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, and eight hours of whatever recreation they could find. There was no telephone and, during the winter, the workers were completely cut off from land apart from the occasional arrival of supply ships.
A Dangerous Crack
On July 22, 1916, a sandhog discovered a foot-wide crack in the tunnel. Disturbed by the sound of rushing gas, he notified his superiors, however, work continued on the tunnel. By the end of that day, worker Patrick Delaney quit, saying “there was enough gas in the tunnel to light the city of Cleveland.”…