Lake Erie's Algae Crisis: When Toledo Lost Its Water
Near Toledo, Ohio
On August second, two thousand fourteen, the city of Toledo told its residents not to drink the water. Not to boil it, not to filter it, not to use it at all. Boiling, in fact, would make things worse.
The culprit was a harmful algal bloom in Lake Erie, fed by phosphorus washing off farm fields in the Maumee River watershed. The bloom had grown dense enough to concentrate microcystin, a liver toxin produced by cyanobacteria, just below the surface of the lake, near the intake pipe for Toledo's water treatment plant. The toxin got through the treatment process. For three days, a major American city had no safe tap water.
The crisis was startling but not surprising to anyone who had been watching Lake Erie for years. Toledo sits at the mouth of the Maumee River, and nearly ninety percent of the land along that watershed is farmed, mostly corn and soybeans. Fertilizer runoff, rich in phosphorus and nitrogen, drains into the Maumee every spring when snowmelt and rain carry it off the fields. The river delivers that nutrient load directly into the western basin of Lake Erie, the warmest and shallowest part of the lake and the most prone to blooms.
The two thousand fourteen crisis was the worst Toledo had seen, but algal blooms in western Lake Erie had been building in severity since the nineteen nineties, after decades of improvement following the original Great Lakes cleanup in the nineteen seventies.
Researchers say a forty percent reduction in phosphorus inputs is needed to meaningfully reduce bloom frequency. That work is underway through voluntary farm conservation programs, but progress is slow against the scale of the watershed.
The Maumee built Toledo. The algae crisis is a reminder that what flows down the Maumee still shapes life in the city.
