CLEVELAND — The final chapter of Cleveland’s decades-long effort to keep untreated sewage out of Lake Erie and its rivers is set to begin, with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District awarding a $324.8 million contract to build the Big Creek Tunnel.
The Granite-Super Joint Venture, pairing California-based Granite Construction with Super Excavators, will bore the tunnel as part of the award announced October 1. Construction is scheduled to start this fall and wrap up in the winter of 2030, capping a project that will appear in Granite’s third-quarter contract awards.
The scope is massive: 22,300 linear feet of 20-foot-diameter tunnel, plus another 3,115 linear feet of ancillary tunnels including adits, an overflow tunnel, a connecting tunnel and a dewatering tunnel. The contract also calls for multiple shafts, diversion and screening structures, gate control vaults, consolidation sewers and an overflow box culvert.
The Big Creek Tunnel is the seventh and final large-diameter storage tunnel under Project Clean Lake, the $3 billion, 24-year program the sewer district launched in 2011 to modernize wastewater infrastructure across Northeast Ohio. When complete, the tunnel alone will eliminate about 550 million gallons of combined sewer overflows each year.
Granite’s tunnel division vice president Jim Nickerson said the project’s scale and complexity fit the company’s tunneling strengths, calling it a major wastewater project that will strengthen system performance and protect local waterways across the region.