When walking near the Cuyahoga River these past few weeks, the water may have looked lower than usual — but no need for alarm.
After nearly two weeks without a drop of rain in most parts of Portage County, the Cuyahoga River reached its lowest water level in the area in eight years on Sept. 22, according to data from the United States Geological Survey.
“Natural river levels are never static, so they’re always going up and down,” said David Costello, an ecosystem ecologist and associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Kent State University. “It depends on the season. It depends on the vegetation community nearby, and it depends on weather, whether it’s rained recently or not. It’s only rivers that are dammed and regulated, where humans control the flow, where you have a constant flow rate.”
Cuyahoga River levels measured at a gauge height of 2 feet above the reference point the night of Sept. 22 at the Old Portage site in Akron, which is the monitoring location closest to central Portage County. Levels began to decrease Sept. 9.
By the afternoon of Sept. 24, the river measured 4.16 feet, and levels have remained above at least 2.29 feet since then. Last September, levels ranged from 2.24 to 3.52 feet.
This has not affected the drinking water in Portage County, since the area receives its water from wells, not the river, said Daniel Blakely, director of Portage County Water Resources.
“I don’t suspect that there will be any real issues moving forward for us, because it looks like the rain is starting to return here,” Blakely said. “We’ve gone about a month, I think, without the rainfall being what we would suspect it to be for this area. But the month prior to that, we had more water than we expected.”
Beyond people
When water levels get low for prolonged periods of time during a hot season or if a valley-like section of the river becomes stagnant and isolated from the main channel, oxygen concentrations in the water decrease and can negatively affect a river’s food web, Costello said.
“Fish are the most sensitive to temperature and oxygen,” Costello said. “There can be areas where, if the water level drops, an area of the river could be not flowing like the rest of the river. In that case, the big concern there is that the oxygen level can drop in that area of the river, and if there’s fish trapped in that section, they could potentially have low oxygen stress.”
The Cuyahoga’s fish community needs oxygen in the water. They are supported by insects and other invertebrates living in the river, like mussels and insects, and feed on algae that grow along the water.
Plants and vegetation near the Cuyahoga are well adapted to changing conditions and are “surprisingly resilient,” according to Costello. Smaller organisms live fine under low-oxygen conditions, but insects are most affected.
These issues, however, are not a typical worry for the Cuyahoga River.
“We don’t think about low water levels in this part of the country, especially in big rivers like the Cuyahoga,” Costello said. “The Cuyahoga always has water, and it’s always moving.”
The water’s discharge levels, or the volume of water passing through a river channel at a given time, also fluctuate with rainfall. Streamflow levels measured below the median from Sept. 9 to Sept. 23. Now, levels sit around the median and are ranked as normal by the USGS.
Costello emphasized the importance of supporting the United States Geological Survey, which tracks ecology-based statistics around the country and serves to educate the public.
“These are really useful data and really useful monitoring tools, and it’s really nice to have,” he said. “It would be really unfortunate if this 100-year record of water levels in the Cuyahoga ever got turned off. I don’t think this one will. It’s a really important one, but we see them turning off all the time, and it’s unfortunate.”
