It builds on the unprecedented global collaboration among Ohio, Michigan and the Canadian province of Ontario to reduce phosphorus runoff into the western basin of Lake Erie by 40 percent over the next decade.
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Michelle Slisher and her daughter Raina Slisher, 9, of Blacklick, Ohio walk along the shore at South Bass Island State Park in Lake Erie on July 29, 2015 despite a algae bloom that turns the water green.
Blue and green algal blooms like cyanobacteria in Lake Erie results into extremely risky chemical called microcystin.
For the second year in a row, a harmful algae bloom is beginning to form in Lake Erie – and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that this year’s algae bloom could rival that of 2011, the most severe bloom on record.
There has been a large harmful algae bloom(HAB) growing in the middle of Lake Erie over the last week. Lake Erie has long been a dumping ground for excess nutrients, as farm and factory runoff sends enormous amounts of phosphorus and nitrogen to its waters every year. The west end of the lake near Windsor is seeing severe algae blooms, and it’s moving in this direction. “If you go swimming in it, at the minimum your intestines will be in distress”, Dr. Stumpf told TIME. The least that could happen, according to Stumpf, if the lake does not have cyanobacteria in high concentrations, is some intestinal trouble. “If there’s a lot, there’s a risk of liver damage”. It is deadly to dogs.
“The other aspect is that while water treatment is very effective, [algal blooms] increase the cost”. Thus, the living bacteria in the top layer of the water absorbs sunlight for photosynthesis while at the same time more sunlight is blocked from reaching deeper waters by this scum on the surface. “There’s considerable effort and expense going into treating the water”.
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Earlier this year, fed up with its own mounting filtration bills, the water utility in Des Moines sued five upstream farming districts to force the federal government to regulate their runoff under the Clean Water Act (which exempts most agriculture operations because they’re “non-point” pollution sources). “We can take out anything we’ve seen in the lake”, he said. The bloom is likely to remain until September 2015. When it’s this big it tends to last.
