Loaded Water. Great Lakes freighters line the waterfront -- with a Great Lakes ore carrier center -- and industrial plants crowd the shoreline of the Cuyahoga River which flows through Cleveland into Lake Erie. Industry alone dumps 500 million gallons of waste water a day into the Cuyahoga, and that flow carries 600 tons of suspended solid matter, one of many contributing factors which have made Lake Erie, holding the least water of any Great Lake, the most polluted of them.