Monday Was Third Wettest Day in Cleveland's History

Widespread heavy rain occurred across the area, with as much as 4-5+" of rain being measured in many areas. Here is a map of radar estimated rain from across the area.
Color code:
grey: less than 0.25"
blue: 0.25-1.00"
green: 1-2"
yellow/orange: 2-3"
red: 3-4"
white/pink: 4-6" pic.twitter.com/sAmIC0y0h3
— NWS Cleveland (@NWSCLE) September 8, 2020

If the pandemic hadn’t already killed your Labor Day barbecue, the rain certainly did. Monday’s 3.98 inches of rainfall, as recorded at Cleveland Hopkins International airport, was the third-wettest day on record, according to the National Weather Service.

Storms began bright and early Monday morning and continued unabated through the afternoon. The nearly four total inches of rain is still well off the pace of Cleveland’s wettest day in history, when 4.59 inches of rain poured down on Sept. 7, 1996, exactly 24 years before yesterday.

Flash flooding occurred throughout the area Monday, and MLK Drive became a river. As occasionally happens in Cleveland, the sewer system couldn’t contain the deluge and Lake Erie sustained a combined sewer overflow (CSO) event, resulting in that time-honored Cleveland tradition and meme: poop water. (The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) said that crews were on hand at the time of the event.)

As Hannah Lebovits reported for Scene last month, NEORSD is currently under a Consent Decree with the federal government to fix the combined sewer system to ensure that heavy rainfalls don’t result in sewage leaks. The $3 billion Project Clean Lake is the principal effort to reduce sewer discharge.

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This article appears in Sep 2-8, 2020.