The Cuyahoga River is closer to running free for the first time in 114 years. According to a 2026-04-30 update from Signal Akron, the Free the Falls project — the multi-year effort to remove the 57-foot Gorge Dam in Akron and restore the river's connectivity from Lake Rockwell to Lake Erie — is progressing on schedule. Sediment dredging is well underway, dam removal is set for 2028, and full project completion is targeted for 2030.
What's happening right now
Crews are pulling roughly 865,200 cubic yards of contaminated sediment out of the impoundment behind the Gorge Dam — a slug of accumulated industrial-era material that has to come out before the dam itself can be safely removed. EPA project manager Courtney Winter framed the volume in terms anyone can picture: "about 13 football fields filled to the goal posts," she told Signal Akron.
The dredging started in 2025 and is expected to continue through 2027. Structural removal of the dam itself begins in 2028 and runs into 2030.
The cost — and who's paying
Total project cost is estimated at approximately $130 million. Funding is layered across federal, state, and local sources, including the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and Ohio EPA, with local partners City of Akron, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, and FirstEnergy/Ohio Edison contributing alongside the agency partners.
"The purpose of the project is to restore a free-flowing river for improved water quality and recreational value," Mike Johnson, chief of conservation at Summit Metro Parks, told Signal Akron.
What it means for anglers
For Cuyahoga steelhead anglers, this is the slow-motion arrival of a fishery that has, until very recently, not really existed. The 2013 fish-passage modification at the Gorge Dam allowed lake-run steelhead to ascend past the lower portions of the structure for the first time in modern memory, and ODNR stocking has built a real if still-modest run on the middle river. Full dam removal opens water above the structure that has been closed to lake-run fish since the dam was built in 1912.
It also reshapes the river physically. The Big Falls — submerged behind the impoundment for 114 years — would re-emerge once the water level drops. That restores a natural feature that nobody alive has seen flowing.
The longer arc
The Cuyahoga is the river that caught fire in 1969 and helped produce the Clean Water Act. The fact that we are now talking about removing a dam to improve a steelhead fishery on the same river is the kind of fifty-year recovery arc that does not get acknowledged often enough. Free the Falls is the next chapter.
Reporting and quoted sources: Shams Mustafa for Signal Akron, "Akron Gorge Dam Project Progresses as Free the Falls Updates Are Shared," April 30, 2026. Read the original report.
More on this site: A history of the Cuyahoga River · Free the Falls overview · Live conditions, Cuyahoga River.
