On August 2, it will be 10 years since officials in Toledo alerted residents in the early morning hours not to drink, bathe in or otherwise come into contact with tap water from the Collins Park Water Treatment Plant. For nearly three days chaos reigned, as bottled water sold out that first day before dawn and disappeared from shelves in the region the next day. Restaurants, businesses and pools closed, and the city suffered a huge blow as it garnered international attention in the news. While the Toledo Water Crisis is now history, its legacy remains.
As environmentalists decry the lack of progress in curbing nutrient runoff into Lake Erie and hundreds of scientists continue conducting experiments in labs and in the field, algal blooms (the plural name for a large mass of individual algae organisms) continue to garner headlines.
No one has covered harmful algal blooms (HABS) and the toxins they produce on Lake Erie more extensively than Tom Henry, long-time environmental reporter at Toledo’s The Blade. In fact, he wrote about them nearly 20 years before the Toledo Water Crisis, including a 2013 shutdown of the water plant in Carroll Township, about 30 miles east of Toledo, due to toxic microcystin from an algal bloom overwhelming its treatment systems — the same thing that happened in Toledo.
“That should have been a wake-up call for Toledo, but wasn’t,” Henry said, going on to explain how then-superintendent at the township plant, Henry Biggert, didn’t hesitate to make the call to shut the plant down immediately. “He had a backup, he was able to switch the township over to the City of Port Clinton (water supply) until the threat subsided.”
Unfortunately, there was no backup plan for Toledo’s water system, which also draws its water from Lake Erie. Prior to the three-day crisis a floating algae bloom fed by excess nutrients flowing into the lake, and consisting of an especially virulent concentration of microcystin, neared the water intake on the surface. It was then churned by stormy weather conditions until it reached the intake depth of 10 feet where it was pumped into the city’s drinking water system.
While Henry has interviewed hundreds of public officials, farmers, scientists, and others on algae and water quality issues and written exhaustively on the topic, the problems caused by algal blooms and their toxins on the lake remain. But for water plant operators, any microcystin toxins are largely mitigated by science with new chemical and physical treatments.
“The biggest improvement has been advance notice. We now have buoys equipped with sensors and more field testing to know more information in real time,” he explained. “Water treatment plants have invested millions in more treatment chemicals such as potassium permanganate, carbon and carbon-activated filters and the University of Toledo is using bacteria to help aid filters.”
Environmental activists blame animal farms
Mike Ferner, a coordinating committee member of Lake Erie Advocates, places blame for algal blooms squarely on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in the Ohio, Indiana and Michigan watersheds draining into the lake.
“For a couple decades dissolved phosphorous from the mid-70s to the mid-90s had gone down” Ferner said. “And in the mid-90s, which is exactly when factory farms entered the watershed it started going back up and we began having the algal bloom problem again. The Environmental Working Group’s survey found there are an estimated 800 CAFOs in the Maumee River watershed alone. You’ve got this industry that’s perfectly set up to deliver tremendous amounts of liquid nutrients from animals to the surface water.”
According to Ferner, public awareness of HABs and factory farming has risen since the crisis. But the amount of nutrients flowing into the lake has remained steady, even though row crop farmers have greatly reduced their use of fertilizer, which helps feed algal blooms. Thus, it appears improvements made in agriculture run-off by field farmers has been negated by nutrients running off fields surrounding existing and new CAFOs.
“The row crop farmers are as conscientious as they can be,” Ferner said. “But we have at least four million more animals in the watershed than we had 10 years ago so how the Hell are you going to reduce the nutrients in the lake while adding that many animals?”
Academics, policymakers continue aiming at solutions
Ohio State University’s Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory are at the forefront of Lake Erie water quality research. Director Chris Winslow said many things have changed since the crisis, including new toxin detection systems on the lake and in water plants, new satellite monitoring capabilities and new nutrient conservation programs for farmers.
“Over the last four-year strategic plan, Ohio Sea Grant has partnered with about 600 state and federal agencies, universities, businesses and non-governmental organizations,” he said, including Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine’s H2Ohio program. “Identifying, constructing and managing wetlands for nutrient and sediment reduction, manure management practices and pilot watershed studies to assess the effectiveness of farmers’ best management practices.”
Despite public awareness, evolving technology and new programs, Lake Erie officials in the U.S. and Canada, including national, state, provincial and local governments, still struggle to prevent algal blooms each year. Their goal of reducing phosphorous nutrients by 40 percent by 2025 will not likely be met.
“Unfortunately, the years we hit these targets were because of drought years (little runoff carrying nutrients),” Winslow said, going on to characterize the 40 percent reduction which policymakers set as overly optimistic.
In fact, phosphorus, which encourages the growth of algal blooms and the toxins often produced by them, continues to pour into Lake Erie each spring and early summer. The blooms are detected, analyzed and tracked by a European Union space satellite and remain an annual occurrence during mid-summer to early autumn.
Grass roots campaign sees some results
Five years after the crisis, a handful of community members organized as Toledoans for Safe Water. On a shoestring budget, they successfully secured a Toledo special election in 2019 followed by a landslide win for the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The protection strategy would have offered the lake a novel legal concept in the U.S. called Rights of Nature. But after a series of ups and downs in the courts, a federal judge eventually ruled the new Toledo law vague, overreaching and unenforceable.
Consensus: Another microcystin water crisis not likely
Ferner said he doesn’t foresee another drinking water event like the Toledo Water Crisis.
“I’d say no, and I feel I’m pretty confident in that because we’ve put at least a half billion dollars into upgrading the water treatment plant in Toledo,” he said. “And part of that is because the chemicals they’re using and other new technology they’re using now.”
Henry admits he doesn’t have a crystal ball but says if there is another water crisis on Lake Erie, it likely won’t be because of algal blooms: scientists have mastered removing algae toxins from drinking water. But the algal blooms persist.
“The algae problem is getting worse throughout the world, not just here. It’s one of the biggest impacts of climate change. It’s in China, Africa, South America, south Florida — you name it. Wherever there’s a water quality problem, there’s a land use problem.”
He cited agricultural consolidation as a contributing factor with Lake Erie’s problems.
“In part because of land prices and changing economics over the decades, producers are under greater pressure to feed a world that’s growing while Earth’s climate is changing and becoming more unpredictable,” Henry said. “We’ve lost too much farmland to suburbanization and big box development. Runoff isn’t slowing down. Temperatures are rising.”
As it stands, water officials in Toledo and around Lake Erie have figured out how to produce safe drinking water even in the face of high microcystin concentrations. But the problem of nutrients running off farm fields and entering Lake Erie has not been solved, or even slowed in any meaningful way.
As environmentalists decry CAFOs and scientists continue studying the myriad complications presented by nutrients, agriculture, algal blooms and climate change, journalists like Tom Henry and those with Great Lakes Now (and the Great Lakes News Collaborative) will continue to follow the news and science of HABs on Lake Erie and other Great Lakes.
Catch more news at Great Lakes Now:
From the Ice Age to Now: A Lake Erie timeline
Featured image: Lake Erie bloom. (Photo Credit: GLN)
