In the old days, when it rained, the North Olmsted collections crew would race out to surcharging manholes with portable pumps and work like mad to keep water out of customers’ basements. 

Today, they still go out during rainstorms, but only to monitor the flows and check on the effect of solutions they’ve put in place over the last three years to address the sewer overflow problem. 

“It was a real fire drill,” says collections system foreman Greg Peters, describing...